Dr. Andrew McFarland
Though there was no formal training in psychiatry at the time, he’d become an “enthusiast”28 in the field and, like all other alienists, learned on the job. With breathtaking arrogance, McFarland considered asylum superintendents—himself included—“the best men that society can produce.”29 Yet his board of trustees echoed his self-assessment, finding his “executive ability…unsurpassed.”30
“There is no man in Jacksonville more universally respected than he,”31 sighed one newspaper of the doctor, with all the longing of a love-struck teen.
Elizabeth almost seemed to share some of those sentiments as she took in McFarland’s “kindly, dignified and professional presence.”32 Only belatedly did she even notice that Theophilus was also in the room, creeping in the superintendent’s shadow: a courtier to a king.
They’d come to bid her join them for an interview in the reception room. Elizabeth gladly accepted, happy “to be restored to the civilities of civilization.”33
She hoped this meeting would see her restored to them forever.
She walked with McFarland back to the main building, retracing her steps from the night before. Already, it was a happier journey, the June sunshine casting cross-stitch shadows on the wooden floor as it poured through the grated windows. McFarland strolled confidently by her side with a familiarity borne from six years on the job…and the fact that the asylum was also his home. He, his wife, and their four children lived in an expansive, eight-room apartment within the central building.
Yet his poise was also proof of his affirmed position within his profession. McFarland was at the top of his game: president of the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane （AMSAII） and a leader among his peers. Moreover, since he’d assumed the superintendency of the Illinois State Hospital in 1854, he’d licked the asylum into such shape that he’d written languidly in his last biennial report that there was such “harmony”34 within that “long periods of time elapse, leaving nothing to record of especial interest.”
Little did he know that was all about to change.
CHAPTER 7
The doctor took a seat opposite the Packards in a big rocking chair while Elizabeth and Theophilus shared the sofa. It was McFarland who took the lead—Elizabeth’s husband remaining speechless throughout—as the superintendent guided the interview through small talk to “the progressive ideas of the age, even to religion and politics.”1
With confidence, Elizabeth matched him conversational step for step. She was delighted never to be at a loss for what to say, despite the doctor’s evident intelligence. Indeed, after so many years of being silenced by Theophilus, “dying by inches”2 as he’d crushed her self-esteem, the conversation felt to her like “a feast of reason and a flow of soul.”3
Hungry for the intellectual stimulation, she rather gorged herself. Her husband became a forgotten ghost, so insignificant that she did not talk about him and “particularly avoided any disparaging…remarks respecting Mr. Packard.”4 Though her husband’s presence might have made her feel unable to speak freely, Elizabeth never said so. Rather, she suggested Theophilus became a mere afterthought. Why bother with him when she could climb mind mountains with McFarland?
The doctor rocked gently in his chair and let her speak. Elizabeth took this to be a gallant deferential doffing of his hat, allowing her to take the floor. She wrote that unless her “womanly instincts very much deceived me,”5 McFarland enjoyed their conversation just as much as she. He certainly seemed impressed. Though he wrote that he admired her “good looks,”6 he was even more taken with her “extraordinary powers of mind.”7
How strange it must have been for McFarland to meet the subject of her husband’s application. Did the two measure up? Elizabeth anticipated confidently they did not. Her husband had of course gladly shared with McFarland her medical history; Theophilus lamented that he hadn’t been aware of “the sad risk incurred in marrying any person who has once been insane.”8 Notwithstanding the fact that Elizabeth had performed her wifely duties impeccably for the past twenty-one years—so much so that even her enemies recognized that when it came to domestic accomplishments, she was “a model wife and mother”9—Theophilus claimed she had only “appeared to human view to recover”10 from her teenage commitment. The truth, in his account, was to the contrary: the insanity had always been there—an invisible devil that had danced on her back for all this time and dared only now show its face.