She paused on the threshold of the dining room. Perhaps to her surprise, she saw neatly dressed women sat around a long, oilcloth-covered table, set with glass and china. Seventh Ward was in fact “the most pleasant and highly privileged of all the wards”5 and its inmates considered the most sane. Therefore, as Elizabeth asked her attendant to introduce her, most of the women greeted her with “lady-like civility.”6 Elizabeth, naturally gregarious, found herself almost among friends as she joined them at the table.
As they talked, she discovered that most of the women were well educated, middle-class, middle-aged, and married—just like herself. Nineteenth-century doctors believed patients “ought not to have [their sensibilities] wounded by being herded together in the same apartment with persons whose language, whose habits, and whose manners, offend and shock them,”7 as they feared such unpleasant associations “may retard, and perhaps prevent, [their] cure.”8
Therefore, patients were segregated. Poor immigrant women were nowhere to be seen: they were assigned to the less luxurious wards, so that such “noisy, destructive”9 women, who were considered by doctors “vulgar and obscene”10 and of “low grade of intellect,”11 would not affect the cure of these higher-class patients.
Nor were any of Elizabeth’s new associates women of color. Very few were even admitted; in the preceding nine years, Jacksonville had treated fewer than ten people of color. This was perhaps partly due to discrimination—the asylum had a waiting list of 240, and places were prioritized for whites—but there was also a cultural bias, as certain types of insanity were considered to affect only the “highly civilized,”12 which at that time meant white people. As one doctor explained, “We seldom meet with insanity among the savage tribes of men.”13
Moreover, when U.S. census records revealed that insanity was notably more common among free African Americans than slaves, psychiatrists mistakenly deduced that slavery must be advantageous to mental health. Those few people of color admitted to asylums therefore found the cause of their derangement often listed as just one word: “freedom.”14 One physician even theorized that to run away from slavery was itself madness. To cure slaves of what he called “drapetomania,”15 he prescribed “whipping the devil out of them”16 as well as the amputation of both big toes.
As she ate, crammed in among the other women, Elizabeth could not help but think back to yesterday’s breakfast: sweet Georgie’s platter of fresh strawberries, plucked from her fruitful garden. Here, the fare was “very plain and coarse, consisting almost entirely of bolted bread and meat.”17 Luckily, the meal was over quickly, the attendants chivying the group to “hurry up!”18 even though many had not yet eaten their fill. Elizabeth left their squabbling voices behind, returning alone to her room. She wanted to plot her next move. Fortuitously, as it was “the use of my reason, rather than the loss of it”19 that had led to her committal, she had by then worked out exactly what she must do.
Her only chance of liberty was to persuade the asylum’s superintendent to free her.
After all, he’d based her admittance solely on her husband’s application, but he hadn’t yet met her. She was determined to show she’d been committed merely “for THINKING.”20 Once he realized the truth, she thought, he’d have to let her go.
She did not have long to wait to put her plan into action. As she sat there, deep in thought, a firm knock sounded upon her door, and into her room strode the only man who could save her now.
Dr. Andrew McFarland.
He was, Elizabeth could not help but notice, “a fine-looking gentleman.”21 McFarland had a neatly trimmed goatee beard and a polished bald pate, with salt-and-pepper hair still scratching out his sideburns. Tall, he towered over her petite frame, dark eyes probing into hers. Instantly, she thought him a “true man, made in God’s image.”22 He was six months younger than her.
The superintendent shook her hand. Elizabeth believed “you can feel some people’s hearts in their fingers,”23 and the doctor’s firm grip only increased her fulsome first impression.
There was much in his history to commend him too. McFarland hailed from Concord, New Hampshire, where he’d run the state asylum for seven successful years. Though professionally trained as a medic, he was “of the classic type of intellectuals”24 who pursued a breadth of study. He would quote Shakespeare in his psychiatry essays, found the poetry of Burns “an unfailing fund of amusement,”25 and wrote his own artistic works, hailed by the local paper as “bearing marks of superior poetic genius.”26 His intellect, Elizabeth would later claim, could “hardly be eclipsed.”27