She wondered whether she actually had the guts to pull the trigger.
It would be wrong to say she did not waver. She knew, only too well, what a favored position she held. Did she dare risk that? While the doctor had allowed her to present her defense, she could not be sure he would be as accommodating about these charges of abuse. Her reproof focused not on her own case but on the way the hospital was run, as Elizabeth sought improvements for the whole community. Would he allow her to express her thoughts on that? Or, like Theophilus, would he silence her?
She did not know if she could again bear that gag around her mouth.
But Elizabeth Packard had been changed by her time in the asylum. In Manteno, she had been fighting for her sole survival. She was not alone now. “Motives higher than those of self-interest actuated me, or I could not have done it,” she said. “I felt conscious that I held an influence and power over Dr. McFarland [as the asylum favorite], and I deliberately determined this influence should be felt in [my friends’] behalf.”39
By her own admittance, her courage came as a “surprise.”40
Taking a deep breath, she slowly put her papers in order. She reviewed them one last time, stacking them neatly in a pearl-handled pile. Some friends, braver than others, encouraged her.
“I will back that up, Mrs. Packard,”41 one said.
Another vowed, “I will stand by you.”42
“I tell my fellow captives,” Elizabeth herself wrote, “I will stay with them, and cast in my lot with them, and I will spare no pains, until I work their deliverance.”43 Because, she said, “I love my sisters as I do myself,”44 and for them, she was willing to fight.
She was perhaps inspired, too, by events outside the asylum. Each day, newspapers from across Illinois would pass into the wards, “fixed to neat, baize-covered desks.”45 Elizabeth, like the others, would pore over them, desperate for news of the world beyond the wooden fence.
That November, they were full of stories about the presidential election. On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States: a man who would come to embody the very concept of freedom.
Six days later, Elizabeth Packard presented McFarland with her reproof.
CHAPTER 15
It seems she read it to him herself in his office. She watched his reaction as she tried to find the words to reach him, using “the most expressive terms I could command.”1
“I do not approve of publishing your faults to the world,” she began slowly, “until you have had an opportunity first, to amend your ways and your doings, by being faithfully, candidly and honestly informed of the true position in which you stand as Superintendent of this institution.”2 Her message, she said, was “a kind act from a kind friend,”3 hoping he would change his ways.
She focused mainly on what she saw as the oppressive treatment of patients: the orders that they mustn’t cry, must silence their true thoughts, must believe that “others are better judges of their motives and intentions than themselves,”4 so that, in short, they had to “give up their identity”5 before they were deemed cured, only allowed to leave the asylum once every ounce of spirit had been crushed from them. Though Elizabeth was not privy to the publications of the AMSAII, she’d nonetheless observed the way McFarland was playing Prospero: bending women to his will, the asylum an isolated and darkly enchanted isle on which he held sole sway.
“Dr. McFarland,” she said, “it is my honest opinion that the principles upon which you treat the inmates of this institution, are contrary to reason, to justice, to humanity… Your discipline is invariably calculated to increase their difficulties, and make them worse rather than better. And,” she warned, “even a person with a sound mind, and a sound body, could hardly pass through a course here and come out unharmed.”6
Yet she did not include herself in that category. “I came here a sane person—I shall leave a sane person,”7 she told him plainly. And she promised, “I shall make a sane report of my sane observations here.”8 Though McFarland had shown no signs of being ready to free her, Elizabeth was adamant she would be released. She even threatened him—perhaps the sole selfish reason behind writing the reproof—that if he kept her even another three months, she would expose him publicly, using the “iron pen of the press.”9
“I feel called of God, and I shall obey this call,” she told him, “to expose…your actions…unless you repent.”10
Repentance was of course her object. But, she told him, she wanted him not only to change the way the patients were treated but also to release her friends, many of whom had been there for years. McFarland, she said, had had “no right to them a single day.”11