She did not lie alone. Beside her was her son George, the boy who used to serve her strawberries. He’d died in 1889, aged thirty-five, from tuberculosis. In death, at last, they were together again.
George had no gravestone, but Elizabeth was given one. There were so many epitaphs her family could have chosen, but in the end, they opted for just one word.
Mother.
POSTSCRIPT
“Pray for her,” he urged. “She is a very sick person!”1
The woman in question stood before him, the only woman in a room of men.
She pointed a finger. She spoke back: a woman who refused to be silenced.
He suspected there was “something wrong with her ‘upstairs.’” How else to explain this “unhinged meltdown”2 in which she dared defy him?
It could have been Elizabeth confronting McFarland in the fall of 1860.
It was Nancy Pelosi versus Donald Trump in October 2019.
History favors reruns.
Because that pernicious accusation of insanity, deliberately intended to undermine, haunts the annals of history like a spirit photograph, unsettling and at times unseen.
It is there in politics, acting as a dead weight to drag back the forces of change. The suffragettes in the 1900s: deemed to be “suffering from hysteria.”3 The civil rights activists in the 1960s: masses diagnosed with schizophrenia—once the diagnostic goalposts had been deliberately moved to accommodate their perceived threat. Martha Beall Mitchell, the Watergate whistleblower: forcibly tranquilized by a psychiatrist when she exposed “dirty politics”4 in 1972. （Her name is now synonymous with misdiagnoses when facts are dismissed as delusions.）
And it is there, too, in private homes. Women sent to asylums for bearing illegitimate children, for being lesbian, for being themselves. “You have to hide your feelings,” said one twentieth-century patient, in a direct echo of the Seventh Ward women, “pretend everything is wonderful, if you want to get out.”5
It is a tale as old as time. In 1687, Daniel Defoe railed against the “vile practice now so much in vogue…[men] sending their Wives to Mad-Houses at every Whim or Dislike.”6
And it’s still here now, shadowing our society.
There’s a reason why. As Elizabeth put it 160 years ago, “What is an insane person’s testimony worth?
“Nothing.”7
And so Janice Dickinson, when confronting Bill Cosby the day after he allegedly raped her, was told dismissively, “You’re crazy!”8
And Rose McGowan, having demonstrated her determination to expose Harvey Weinstein’s crimes, found herself the target of a plot to make her seem “increasingly unglued.”9
Devalue the words of women and half the battle is won.
And so with Elizabeth Packard. After all, what was her testimony worth in the end in the decades after her death? As the twentieth century unfurled, her legacy slowly tarnished until, if she was remembered at all, it was only ever as a madwoman who’d tried to ruin McFarland. Psychiatrists reviewing her case confidently said she had suffered from a “menopausal…psychosis.”10 Not knowing that Elizabeth in fact campaigned politically almost until her death, the doctors smugly said that at the expiration of her periods, she “settled down to a quiet life…and the subsidence of the mental symptoms.”11 Centenary flashbacks in the local Jacksonville papers commemorated her as “a minor league nut”12 who “couldn’t keep her mouth shut.”13
McFarland, on the other hand, was honored with a mental health center named after him in Springfield, Illinois. To this day, his oil painting hangs in the lobby, along with his gold-topped cane: a gift from the people of Jacksonville in August 1867—at the height of Fuller’s investigation—as a sign of their trust and regard. A memorial plaque celebrates him as a doctor with a national reputation, an unquestioned authority in his chosen field.
To the victors of history, the spoils.
But Elizabeth Packard wrote, “I am determined…to write my own history.”14 And she did. Her husband, her doctor, and her very time all tried to silence her, but Elizabeth left her own record behind, and her words now blaze through history, to light the way to the truth. She wrote, “We should set our light blazing as an example to others, and not set it under a bushel.”15 Thanks to her brilliance, her light still burns, inspiring others to follow.
And her legacy, finally, is starting to be reassessed. In The History and Influence of the American Psychiatric Association （1987）， she was described as an “effective crusader,”16 and her supposed mental illness was not assumed to be a fact but viewed as a possible plot between the men who’d had charge of her life. More recently, historians have credited the origin of organized campaigns for the mentally ill to Elizabeth: the matriarch of all that was to follow, including the important work being done today, when we know at least one in five of us will struggle with our mental health. Meanwhile, feminists keep tapping away at the injustices women still face in law and life, standing on the shoulders of campaigners like Elizabeth, who laid the foundations for the ongoing fight.