He leaked the full report to the Chicago Tribune.
“This document,” wrote the paper as it splashed its exclusive on December 7, “will produce a profound sensation in the public mind.”28
They were absolutely right.
For as Illinois’s citizens opened up their papers that morning, there was shock after shock after shock. The abuse itself. The callous attitude of the doctor. The fact that patients had been released before they could be tried. The fact that patients had been committed even without evidence of insanity. The recommendation that the doctor be dismissed. It was a horror story of gothic proportions and immediately captured the popular imagination. The story even jumped the Atlantic, with articles published in London and Paris. Like the shocked citizens of Illinois, the Europeans clutched their pearls with dumbfounded dismay.
Perhaps the only person in the whole wide world who was not shocked was Elizabeth Packard.
“Truth…may for a time be crushed to the earth,” she said emphatically, “[but] it shall rise again with renovated strength.”29
With every word she read, Elizabeth felt emotion rising. Because the report set out what she’d always known and always wanted: recognition that McFarland was not fit for his post. Recognition that the abuse she’d witnessed and endured had been real and was not some figment of the patients’ imaginations, as McFarland had always claimed.
To read about the hosts of patients released before the jury trials was confirmation that the women she’d known and loved were sane and did not belong there. Her law had saved them, even if that credit had been denied.
As for the fact that McFarland had been admitting patients without evidence of insanity—well, that hardly came as a surprise. He’d been doing that for years when it came to married women. The only difference now was that it was finally against the law.
“The result of this investigation,” she wrote with feeling, “confirmed the truth of all my charges against the superintendent.”30
For years, he had dismissed and belittled her. He’d underestimated her too. McFarland had once held all the power.
But look at him now.
Elizabeth had once written to the doctor, “If you attempt to sustain your character, by defaming mine…you will work out your own destruction.”31
Finally, that day had come.
Yet Elizabeth had meant what she’d said on the stand in June: she did not hate McFarland. She felt no malice toward him. So it was not revenge that tasted so sweet on that Saturday morning.
It was simple vindication.
CHAPTER 56
April 1869
Boston, Massachusetts
Never had she wanted a train to move faster. Elizabeth Packard, on her way to Boston, stared blindly out the window at the passing landscape of her country. Once, she’d written that she was “the mother of her country,”1 but she’d never forgotten those six children who had a prior and far more powerful claim upon her heart.
Finally, she was on her way to see them again. At least…so she hoped.
She rode not only the train but a wave of public interest in her work. In the wake of the leaking of Fuller’s report, Elizabeth Packard had become a household name, albeit not always in the way she might have wished.
McFarland had not gone quietly after Fuller’s recommendation that he be dismissed. Instead, he and his allies had unleashed a vicious media strategy, with Elizabeth’s personal downfall at its heart. Newspapers supportive to the doctor had swiftly dubbed the official investigation the “Packard-Fuller committee,”2 using her name to undermine it. The more closely they could associate Elizabeth with the inquiry, the easier they hoped it would be for people to ignore. Their motivation was partly financial; the hospital brought prosperity to many, “stimulating business in every direction.”3 Powerful people had pecuniary interests in its continuing to operate as it always had.
Soon references to the “notorious and crack-brained Mrs. Packard”4 had emerged, with McFarland’s supporters reporting that it was only Elizabeth’s “insane imaginings”5 that had prompted the investigation in the first place.
And when this initial attack on Elizabeth’s sanity failed, her letter of January 19, 1863, had been predictably leaked to the press. “We submit, in all candor, that the writer of that letter was either insane, or a bad woman,” the Jacksonville Journal had savagely sneered. “[It] exposes her to the public gaze as a strumpet.”6
Thus the scandal had unfolded exactly as Elizabeth had feared. She’d become trapped as she’d thought she would be: between bars of public opinion that made her either mad or bad. McFarland’s allies had deliberately thrown her under the bus: mere collateral damage deemed necessary to protect an important man. Though the committee, speaking in her defense, said rather naively that “her character as a virtuous lady was not involved”7 with the allegations McFarland had been called to answer, as any woman who has ever taken the stand in any courtroom knows, her character as a virtuous lady is always involved…