On the contrary. Although her views were now supported by many in the medical field, Elizabeth still found herself under constant attack, regularly dismissed as a “female paranoiac”8 and “half-cured lunatic.”9 She felt she had to fight her way “through fire and blood to carry out [her] benevolent purposes to humanity.”10
“At every inch of progress,” she complained, “[I am] compelled to face the barbed arrow of insanity, hurled at [me] by the intolerant and bigoted of [my] age.”11
And no sooner did she successfully pass a law to protect patients than the asylum superintendents would begin battling to overturn it, grumbling that “just one woman should be able to defeat all the doctors.”12 But defeat them she did. Year after year, she returned to Springfield, Illinois, to defend her landmark personal liberty bill. Lawyer Myra Bradwell supported it too, reminding people that before the law was passed, “A great many people were sent to the insane asylums who were as sane as the person that sent them.”13
Yet more hurtful to Elizabeth than the allegation she was insane was the way her so-called love letter to McFarland regularly resurfaced to besmirch her virtue. She called it “the greatest obstacle”14 to her campaigning work, McFarland “my most terrible antagonist.”15
The doctor was clever in his campaigning against her though. He wrote no articles; he made no grand declarations. Instead, a private letter here, a well-timed visit there, and his opinion of Elizabeth would be conveyed with far more devastating power than a more public attack.
And despite what had happened in Illinois, with the legislature confirming he should be fired, McFarland did still have power and influence. Incredibly, he still had his reputation. In the wake of the legislature accepting the committee’s recommendations, all the hospital’s trustees had resigned. They’d long been on McFarland’s side, having published a “whitewashing report”16 in his defense in 1868. It explained away his breaking of the 1865 law as a mere “technical appearance of non-compliance”17 and described the staff’s cruel acts as “accidental collisions”18 that were simply “styled…abuse.”19 （They even dared congratulate the doctor that “only” 1 in every 125 patients had been abused, though a supporter of McFarland later quoted 1 in 63. “Who would not regard that a success?”20 the trustees had cheered without irony.） Because by law, the trustees were the only people with the power to fire McFarland, their mass resignation meant the doctor escaped that fate.
In the end, it wasn’t until June 8, 1870, that McFarland finally stepped down—of his own volition—two and a half years after Fuller first published his report. Curiously, just as had occurred when the investigating committee had first been appointed, there was a sudden exodus of patients just before the new superintendent started.
Double the usual number of patients were discharged before McFarland left for good.
The Illinois Daily State Journal marked his departure by declaring that he was retiring “with the satisfaction of knowing that his pre-eminent fitness for the position he has so long filled…is everywhere recognized.”21
That was evidently incorrect, but the article demonstrated a convenient rewriting of history that soon settled into supposed fact. Even in 1869, pro-McFarland papers were pushing the narrative that he had been “entirely exhonorated [sic]”22 in an investigation “not composed of…interested officials,”23 by which they meant the trustees’ biased report. By 1891, the received wisdom was that Elizabeth’s allegations “were not substantiated by the public inquiry.”24
So the doctor’s career remained more than intact; it blossomed. Having departed the asylum an incredibly wealthy man—he had a property and personal wealth portfolio worth $50,000 （$984,622）—McFarland opened a private asylum in Jacksonville called Oak Lawn.
For more than a decade, it took only male patients.
Nevertheless, it was hugely successful, becoming one of the best known institutions in the country. With the white man colonizing new territory in the West, McFarland accommodated all the insane patients from these areas, including Wyoming, Montana, and Oklahoma （whose mental patients, curiously enough, were chiefly Native American）。
McFarland, the “distinguished founder”25 of this respected institution, was so well regarded nationally that he also contributed to two of the most significant insanity cases of the century, being consulted in the trial of President Garfield’s assassin and in the case of Lincoln’s widow. In the latter, for $100 （$2,345）， McFarland gave his professional opinion that Mary Todd Lincoln had a “helpless and irresponsible state of mind”26 and should be committed indefinitely. Her son, Robert, ultimately ignored his recommendation; soon afterward, Mary was legally declared “restored to reason.”27 No thanks to McFarland, she lived the rest of her life a free woman.