Fireflies buzzed about her, their light trying to shine inside. Elizabeth had always had the run of this palatial asylum, but now she wondered how well she really knew it. Maybe Mrs. Hosmer had been right. Maybe there were things she didn’t know, secret chambers she had not yet seen. As McFarland continued to withhold Toffy’s letter, she felt as though she’d stumbled into one.
To her repeated appeals, McFarland remained a “deaf adder”：51 a snake that hissed his obstructions even as he smiled. Elizabeth felt almost in a daze. She’d thought she knew the doctor well, but she did not recognize this man. He’d never treated Elizabeth this way.
Eventually, defeated, she left his office and slowly retraced her steps to the ward. So many times that summer, she’d walked with surety through those long corridors, convinced of the goodness of the man in charge. She felt no such certainty now.
“It is too true,” she realized sadly. “You are not our friend.”52
All summer, she’d woven words with the doctor in conversations that had scaled new heights. Elizabeth felt giddy suddenly, realizing how very far she had to fall. That web of words seemed treacherous now, each silver string laced with poison. An incontrovertible truth gleamed forth: “His word could no longer be trusted.”53
CHAPTER 13
She began to watch McFarland more closely. She noticed he made a point of asking her, “Mrs. Packard, who are your friends? Have you any in the wide world?”1
“Every means possible,” Elizabeth perceived, “is used to impress upon my mind the feeling that I am friendless… But I will not believe it.”2
After all, if McFarland had blocked Toffy’s letters, there was a chance he’d confiscated the Blessings’ missives too.
Such censorship was commonplace in nineteenth-century asylums, as any link to patients’ former lives was deemed “injurious”3 to health. McFarland’s own instruction to patients’ friends was to “let [them] alone”4 and never write at all. Those who ignored his “sterling commandment”5—such as Toffy—were easily stymied. Every letter that arrived at Jacksonville was inspected by McFarland and “immediately destroyed if it unfortunately contains anything which he disapproves of.”6
Yet until Elizabeth had spied Toffy’s letter, she’d had no idea what was happening. Even after that, encased in uneasy ignorance, she could not be fully sure what McFarland was doing. It was only one letter she’d seen; she did not suspect the censorship was as extensive as it was. So instead, she wrote bleakly of “the sense of desolation which the total withdrawal of friends throws over a prisoner’s life.”7
“It [is] hard to be forgotten,”8 she simply said.
Yet her feelings were the fruit McFarland hoped to harvest, the censorship all part of his idiosyncratic interpretation of moral treatment. His idea was that once patients were completely isolated from family, as he’d instructed, he would then step into that void. McFarland thought the ideal way to treat insanity was for him to become “the dominant and good spirit”9 in his patients’ lives: the higher power from which they were to take their every direction.
Although leading psychiatrists advised strongly that hospital staff should not treat patients “with feelings of superiority,”10 McFarland believed the opposite. In his opinion, he was the patients’ superior, and the quicker they came to appreciate that “his judgment is a safer guide for [them] than [their] own conscience,”11 the better. He wanted the patients under his control to “shape [their] manner of living, in all its minutiae, to the hourly prescription of [their] superior,”12 the latter a word he used interchangeably for doctor. This shaping of their lives extended to the clothes they wore, the food they ate, the activities they pursued, and—most chillingly—to the very thoughts they thought.
“The superior…takes full possession of the subject,” McFarland wrote candidly, “acts for him, thinks for him.”13 And once such possession had been achieved, the doctor would “modify his thoughts.”14 McFarland perceived himself as a “benignant Prospero [who] controls, for the best of purposes, the Caliban…under his direction.”15
McFarland was the puppet master, the women of Seventh Ward the mute marionettes he tailored to his satisfaction.
And it was this specific mode of treatment he’d been using with Elizabeth Packard ever since she’d arrived at the asylum. His intention had always been that she would become “elevated by his smile, [and] would bow at his reproof.”16