He’d sent the letter back to her husband with a single sentence scrawled upon it: “Is Mrs. Shedd becoming more insane?”33
In her evidence, she also described McFarland’s rather hands-on application of moral treatment—the same kind Elizabeth had experienced.
“He came in and took hold of both my hands,” Tirzah testified, “crossed them before me, and pulled me right up close to him. When he drew me up to him…he said, ‘If you were my wife, I should want you at home.’”34
A ripple of consternation coursed through the committee. They hadn’t been expecting evidence like this.
On another occasion, Tirzah said, when she donned a new, becoming white dress, the doctor had remarked, “I don’t see how a man could put a lady like you away from her home.”35 Tirzah testified that she felt these moments of intimacy were McFarland taking “improper liberties.”36
Fuller and his fellow men exchanged looks of concern. These allegations reflected on McFarland personally, not just professionally. They felt he should be present. They therefore passed a new resolution at noon that day—“That he （the Superintendent） be invited to examine the testimony, and, if he desires, to cross-examine the witness”37—and sent an invitation to the doctor to join their afternoon session at 1:00 p.m.
It meant that when Elizabeth took the stand that afternoon, she would be under the doctor’s eyes again and subject to his questions: the first committee witness to be so closely examined. Yet in turn, she would finally have a chance to take the doctor to task in public.
The stage was set for a showdown. It really would be as one headline put it: “Dr. McFarland vs. Mrs. Packard.”38
CHAPTER 53
Elizabeth came with no lawyer, even though she was speaking under oath—or, perhaps, because of it. “I needed none,” she later said, “because truth is its own vindicator.”1
McFarland, however, was represented, though he, too, seemed intent on telling truths. Upon his arrival, when the committee asked him about Tirzah’s allegations, the doctor replied breezily that he thought her testimony “essentially true; as he was aware of remarks of similar purport, in many instances.”2 His whole approach with female patients was to provide a hand to hold and a shoulder to cry on, to take on the role of quasi husband, so that these disobedient women would once again learn to submit to masculine authority. He saw nothing wrong with it; he did it with them all.
Given the short notice, McFarland used one of the trustees, Isaac Morrison, as his attorney. Due to a recently broken leg, Morrison had to be carried into the hotel parlor where the hearings were held, clasped in the arms of four stout men.
Yet broken leg or no, his mind was as sharp as ever. At forty-one, Morrison was renowned as “one of the ablest and most highly reputed lawyers at the Illinois bar.”3 A stout man himself, he had a mustache as bushy as his eyebrows and a thatch of dark hair that he wore in a side parting. He favored bow ties—and excoriating witnesses.
As Elizabeth swore her oath and sat to give her evidence, both McFarland and Morrison watched her closely. McFarland had no real fear of her testimony; he thought her a “crazy woman, whose influence, compared with [mine is] nothing.”4 As the doctor surveyed the gathered politicians, trustees, reporters, and clerks who’d crowded into the room, he had no doubt he would come out on top.
Even when Elizabeth started speaking, he was not perturbed. She read a prepared address to begin with; it was concerned “not so much with the hospital as with the laws of the State, that [had] placed her in the power of her husband.”5 When she eventually got to McFarland, it was really just more of the same. “It is not that Dr. McFarland is so much worse than many other men that we hear such tales of horror from this region of despotism,” she testified, “but it is that Illinois has given him power such as no human being can long hold without becoming despotic.”6
But as the afternoon wore on, the hours passing by one after the other, Elizabeth made the most of the opportunity to describe her asylum experience. It was what she’d longed for ever since she’d started her journal. All those years, she had been subjected and silenced, the doctor so convinced of his absolute power that her every attempt to rebuke him had been taken almost as a joke. How he had sneered when she’d told him he was destined to see her “rising and applauded as the world’s reformer.”7 Well, the joke was over now, and no one was laughing. As she spoke in all seriousness, the whole room listened.