“Then you are determined to leave your wife in an Insane Asylum,” she stated flatly. Despite everything, she could not believe it had come to this. A rush of anger seized her. “O, husband! How can you do so?” Her rage came out in hot tears.
Theophilus was unmoved. “I hoped we should have a pleasant interview before we parted,” he griped, annoyed. According to what he professed, he was doing this for her own good and that of the children—to save their souls. Why couldn’t she see it?
She begged and pleaded, told him to think of “those dear little motherless children.”
He was adamant. “I shall see that they are well taken care of.”
“But you cannot give them a mother’s care,” she cried. “O, how can my children live without their mother; and how can I live without my children?”
At the thought, she could not bear it. She rose from her seat, passion forcing her legs to pace, her feelings so intense she had to hold a handkerchief to her face to cover it. Still, her tongue tried to save her. Weaving words, she conjured plaintive arguments, expressive pleas, entreating him to reconsider. She could not look at him as she cast her magic, perhaps too scared to see what was in his face. She paced the room instead, each length a last-ditch attempt to persuade him. She channeled all her emotion into walk and turn, walk and turn, to keep from breaking down.
Elizabeth is overcome at the thought of living without her children
Yet eventually, when he’d said nothing for some time, she dared risk a glance at him…
He was fast asleep on the sofa.
Elizabeth’s pacing ground to an unhappy halt. The fight went out of her too. “I see it is of no use to say anything more,” she said.
But there was still the doctor… Upon waking, that was where Theophilus went next: to see McFarland, leaving his wife in the reception room. Elizabeth felt she still had “a little ray of hope to cling to, as Mr. Packard had not yet left.”23 Perhaps McFarland would step up and insist that Theophilus had to take her home.
She was not privy to their conversation in the doctor’s office. She could not see the asylum’s register. She did not know that the previous day, McFarland had made a new entry. On June 19, 1860, Elizabeth Packard—without her knowledge—had been formally admitted to the asylum.
In truth, her admittance was a foregone conclusion. Her husband’s application had not only included his own account of her supposed madness; it contained two medical certificates from two different doctors also attesting she was insane. Both recounted her “derangement of mind,”24 namely upon “religious matters,”25 yet more telling were the doctors’ more detailed assessments. One of the certificates was supplied by Dr. Newkirk, the member of her husband’s church; he’d issued his certificate eight days after he’d signed the parishioners’ petition, which ended any pretext of impartiality. He cited her “incessant talking”26 as evidence of madness.
The second was signed by a doctor from Kankakee, Christopher Knott, who’d been briefed beforehand by Theophilus that he “designed to convey”27 Elizabeth to the asylum. Such briefings were commonplace; as psychiatrists conceded there was a “deficiency of science”28 regarding insanity, they were reliant on families’ accounts, at least in the first instance, to make their diagnoses. Really, certificate-issuing physicians simply rubber-stamped whatever a family said. So it had been with Dr. Knott. Without revealing his purpose to his so-called patient, he’d called at the Packards’ home and deliberately engaged Elizabeth in conversation about religion “for the purpose of drawing her out.”29 Yet to Knott, her religious beliefs were not her only symptoms; he also noted her “unusual zealousness”30 and prominent “strong will.”31
“Incessant talking.” “Unusual zealousness.” “Strong will.” These were, in fact, textbook examples of female insanity in the nineteenth century. Doctors frequently saw pathology in female personality.
And so, with these certificates formally filed, Elizabeth’s fate had been sealed. McFarland’s cursive script in the asylum log recorded that Elizabeth was “slightly insane,”32 with the “present attack more decided the past four months.”33 This dated exactly to the time she’d joined the Bible class and begun forthrightly to express her opinions—in opposition to both her husband’s wishes and his own beliefs.
Curiously, although the certifying doctors cited her religion as the main reason for her madness, she was not admitted as a case of religious insanity. This makes plain the importance of the doctors’ other observations. Instead, in an echo of her time at the Worcester asylum, Elizabeth was admitted to Jacksonville because of her “excessive application of body & mind.”34