They did not look as wild as they could sometimes sound.
In hurried, frightened whispers, they began to talk to her, sharing “base charges…against the doctor,”46 shocking claims of abuse and mistreatment by the staff. Elizabeth listened politely but felt skeptical. In her experience, “order and system marked all the arrangements”47 of the asylum; it seemed hard to believe these claims were true.
Nevertheless, she tried to help her fellow patients. “Go with [your complaints] to Dr. McFarland,” she urged. “He is our friend.”48
But to such a suggestion, there was only bleak despair: “It is of no use.”49 Some women even claimed they were sane but had been moved to these lower wards by McFarland as punishment.
At this, Elizabeth’s skepticism simmered straight to disbelief. A man of honor such as McFarland would never do such a thing.
As she walked away, Elizabeth shook her head sadly—with pity. It was perhaps her first encounter with the truly insane. Remarkable indeed, she thought, were these “hallucinations of a diseased mind.”50
Yet the following day, she was told by her attendant that she must not speak with the lower ward patients. Why, she wondered, would McFarland issue such a strange decree?
Unsettled, she decided to become a “silent eye and ear witness”51—to what was really happening in the hospital.
CHAPTER 11
Elizabeth settled into her new role with ease. In truth, the claims of the lower ward patients were not the only thing that had rattled her since her commitment. The seeming sanity of her friends on Seventh Ward was another. But, she’d always reasoned, it was not fair to judge McFarland on this when she was “ignorant of all the light by which [his] actions have been guided.”1 Her friends seemed sane now, true, but perhaps that was because they had recovered with the doctor’s help—and would soon be released.
Her other, major concern was the way the attendants could be. There was a “system of compulsory obedience”—herself excluded—“fearful punishments and unreasonable restrictions.”2 The patients were kept, in her view, under extraordinary surveillance and control, with edicts issued on when they should rise and sleep and bathe. There were rules on when they had to change their underwear, their menstrual cycles were monitored, and they were sometimes even forced to have their hair cut against their will. “Their rules,” wrote a female patient archly, “are enough to make a rational person crazy.”3
The rules were one thing, but it was the unkindness that really got to Elizabeth. Nor could she understand it. If a fellow patient cried in her prayer circle, she would comfort them. But an attendant, witnessing the same scene, would say, “You mustn’t cry—you are getting worse—you can’t go home until you stop fretting.”4 Even just expressing a wish to go home was frowned upon. Though Elizabeth believed it a natural desire, psychiatrists of the day thought differently. “It is always a suspicious circumstance,” one doctor wrote haughtily, “and always a sufficient warrant for delay”5 in sending a patient home, evidence of a “lingering spark of disease.”6
After all, a truly sane patient would want to stay until made well.
Perhaps most difficult of all for Elizabeth to witness, however, was the way her friends were treated when the mothers among them mourned the children they were missing. Elizabeth knew it was “as hard to dance without music, as it is for…a mother to be happy away from her babes,”7 but the Seventh Ward women were told they could not go home until they stopped “grieving and talking about their children.”8 If they did not desist, punishment was threatened.
“We must seem happy when we are miserable,” wrote one of Elizabeth’s friends glumly, “or we can have no chance for a release.”9 Every natural emotion—whether grief, fear, or resentment at the rules—had to be stifled. The women walled themselves up behind masks of good manners, politely smiling, calmly chattering about things of no consequence, afraid that anything else would only condemn them—and with good reason. Nineteenth-century asylum records show that women were often put into solitary confinement if they were “being violent, mischievous, dirty, and using bad language.”10 Anything deemed unladylike or overly emotional was banned.
The women had to bear all this “silently and meekly…entirely non-resistant.”11 Daily, they cut themselves to the institution’s pattern: a coterie of fabric dolls that said please and thank you, no matter how they were treated.