This, McFarland felt, was a ridiculous decision. Patients’ accounts, in his view, “should be cast aside as unworthy of notice.”23 Their testimony was merely “perverted representations by those who have been in no condition to form a correct judgment.”24 But the committee concluded, “To reject their testimony, appeared to [us] as calculated to defeat an investigation after the truth, and possibly subvert the ends of public justice.”25
Elizabeth wholeheartedly agreed. “The representations of the patients are the truest representations of the asylums,” she avowed. “They are ten times better qualified to report what takes place in the wards, for they are eye-witnesses to it.”26
The committee also chose to prioritize investigation of the reported cruelty. At that opening session, they took evidence from three witnesses: Elmer Searle, a former patient; Susan Kane, a former attendant, who admitted she herself had been abusive; and Priscilla Graff, the former sewing room directress, who was as prepared to speak out as she’d always been.
Kane gave the most memorable testimony. She recalled how her fellow attendant “would not let [the patients] sit down, and if she found them so sitting, she would take them by the hair of the head and lift them on the seat, and if they resisted she would often shove them back against the wall and choke them, or compel them in some harsh way to comply.”27 That harsh way could include the cold baths Elizabeth had so often heard occurring, where patients were submerged relentlessly under the water, only allowed up, Kane said, to “cast the water from their stomach…the same process continued as long as the patient was thought able to bear it.”28 She added that she “made no complaints to Dr. McFarland of these abuses, because it was understood in the institution that such complaints would receive no attention.”29
The committee was shocked by what it heard. For the first time since their appointment, they began to have “serious apprehensions that a harsh, if not inhumane and brutal policy had been adopted by the officers and attendants in the treatment of patients.”30
Therefore, their second meeting was convened quickly, just a few weeks later in early June. To this session, Elizabeth Packard was invited to give evidence. She arrived in Jacksonville on a warm summer’s day, accompanied by another witness, Tirzah Shedd, whom she’d recently befriended.
Elizabeth had not been idle in the months since her bill had passed. As she had in 1864, she’d been crisscrossing the state, selling her books and lecturing now, too, on their contents. As she did so, she met more and more women who had their own stories to share of their experiences in the asylum, including Tirzah.
Unlike McFarland, who felt such stories should be silenced, Elizabeth was fascinated by the tales they had to tell. She had never written off patients, whether she thought them mad or not. Elizabeth always saw the people, not the pathology. Even after she’d won her liberty, she’d never forgotten them. She’d never considered these patients as having nothing to say; on the contrary, she wanted to give them agency to say it.
She encouraged the people she met, of course, to give evidence to the committee, but as she listened to their stories, another idea hit her. An idea for a new book: one that collected all these women’s voices together and allowed them to be heard. It could be combined with her own asylum journal to allow a whole sisterhood to speak out. She asked Sarah Minard to contribute, Tirzah too, as well as other women she met. She even contacted her old friend Sophia Olsen, now living happily in Wheaton painting maps, and asked if she might turn her own asylum journal into a piece for a new book. Sophia willingly agreed, as did the others. The husband of one woman, Caroline Lake, said candidly, “I hope, Mrs. Packard, you will have all the testimony published, for it ought to be.”31
That was just what Elizabeth intended—as soon as the committee had completed its work.
In the meantime, she’d been summoned to help with it. On June 6, 1867, she and Tirzah arrived at the Dunlap House with a sense of apprehension, not knowing what giving evidence might be like.
The Dunlap was Jacksonville’s premier hotel: a highly attractive brick building set over three stories, with ornate metal balconies on the bottom two floors. It was topped by a handsome observatory from which guests could take in the sights of Jacksonville.
That morning, however, Elizabeth had eyes only for the committee.
They asked Tirzah to give evidence first. She’d been committed in 1865—after what she called a “mock jury trial”32—for her spiritualism. Thirty-five, with three children, she’d been committed shortly after her baby Alma had been born; she’d been dragged away from her by six strong men, her hands cuffed to stop her from fighting. She stayed fourteen weeks at the asylum, witnessing water torture and experiencing the same censorship as Elizabeth. After her release, she’d written to McFarland to urge him to resign because of the abuse she’d seen.