In the meantime, the investigation continued.
The committee, in the end, spoke to twenty-two former patients, plus former employees. They heard from erstwhile senator and congressman John Henry, who’d once acted as the asylum’s steward. He testified that he’d seen three attendants abuse a patient by “pouring water in his face and nose from a pail.”9 He’d reported it to McFarland, but the doctor “appeared indifferent”10 and took no action.
“[He] is destitute of common sympathy to the patients,” Henry testified, “and [does] not listen to their complaints with kindness; nor give that personal attention to the conduct of the attendants which [is] necessary to a personal knowledge of their treatment.”11
Most of the complaints relating to McFarland were identical to Henry’s account, citing his consistent lack of investigation of allegations of abuse. Mrs. Graff, however, testified that she believed the doctor had once directed a patient to be given a water punishment, while another attendant said that both a patient and Lizzie Bonner had told her McFarland had kicked the patient in the face. The attendant could testify that “one eye was black, and one side of her face was very much bruised and blackened for several days,”12 but she herself had not seen the doctor actually strike the woman. In total, eighteen attendants who’d been cruel were identified.
On November 12, 1867, the committee gathered for what was to be their final session—or so they thought. In fact, due to a cholera epidemic at the asylum in which eight died, McFarland could not be present. Fuller took the opportunity to tell the trustees he would not be taking McFarland’s own testimony, which the doctor had asked to give. The trustees were outraged: “The Superintendent was to be tried, judged and degraded without being permitted to open his mouth.”13
It was, in fact, the same fate married women had endured before Elizabeth’s personal liberty law had passed, but this irony was seemingly lost on them.
Given McFarland’s absence, another session was added to the diary on November 29. On this date, the committee heard “the balance of the testimony offered by Dr. McFarland,”14 which probably meant the testimony of those witnesses summoned by the doctor to speak in his defense.
Almost a week later, on December 4, the trustees met for their quarterly meeting. They spent the day as usual: enjoying a first-rate lunch and a tour of the hospital wards that were open to them. In the evening, they gathered around a table in a meeting room to conclude their business.
An unexpected knock came upon their door.
When it opened, a man with hooded eyes stood there, his beard hanging fuzzily two inches below his chin. In his hands, he held a stack of papers, more than a hundred pages high. He looked as reluctant to be there as they were to see him.
It was General Fuller—and he had come to read the trustees his final report.
CHAPTER 55
Fuller was invited in, the trustees welcoming him with as much enthusiasm as they might a vampire. He was there at the governor’s insistence; Oglesby had said the trustees should hear the report at once. Fuller had followed his boss’s instructions. As the six trustees stared at him with unconcealed animosity, he picked up page one and began to read aloud.
As he did, the faces of his audience darkened further. One of the first sections touched on the insanity trials that had taken place earlier that year, at which every patient had been found insane. Elizabeth Packard, whose law had facilitated them, had been pilloried in the press for this time-and money-wasting “ridiculous farce,”1 while she herself had suffered personally in the knowledge that her reforms had come too late to save her sisters.
But Fuller had been studying the asylum’s discharge statistics closely. “There were 127 patients discharged between February 28th, the day the committee was appointed, and July 24th, the day of the commencement of inspection of patients [by the committee at the hospital],”2 Fuller read aloud.
He highlighted that in that short but very relevant period, McFarland had in fact doubled the number of patients he’d released as cured.
“This increase in the rate of recovery is a little noticeable,” Fuller said pointedly, “but in the absence of proof to the contrary, the committee are bound to suppose the fact incidental, and not the result of a policy to make rapid discharges to avoid examination.”3
Yet the statistics, in this case, did not lie. It seemed apparent that rather than risk a jury finding his patients sane, McFarland had let them go. That was why Sarah Minard, confined for nine years, had suddenly been released on May 1, 1867: the day before the trials began.