And Elizabeth found her kindness wrought wonders. “I find, from my observation here, that lunatics won’t hurt folks, if you’ll only let them alone, and have pasture large enough,”18 she said. The mentally ill were not “brute beasts, but human beings, with human feelings.”19 Day by day that late November of 1860, Elizabeth Packard, fighting a one-woman war, slowly restored their humanity to them. It required so much effort that to clean one patient and one room took a whole day’s labor.
As Elizabeth had hoped, her example soon inspired the Tenney sisters to join her. Together, they tackled not only the patients but also the ward itself. Elizabeth scrubbed the dirt-encrusted walls and floors until sweat ran in thick rivers down her face. The three of them stripped back the beds and opened up the elderly tick mattresses; the straw inside was frequently rotten to the core from the patients’ incontinence and had in most instances become “as black as soot.”20 Elizabeth, needle now in hand, stitched new cloth covers for them and refilled the mattresses with fresh, soft straw. All these tasks she continued, day after day, for about three weeks, at which point the first patient she had cleaned was due another sponge bath, and she began the cycle all over again.
Working closely together, she and the Tenney sisters soon became friends within only a few days of her being on the ward. “Mrs. Packard,” Minnie said one morning, “I shall not treat you as I do the other patients, notwithstanding the Doctor has ordered me to. I shall use my own judgment, and treat you as I think you deserve to be treated.”21 Her open-mindedness made the world of difference to Elizabeth: “To [Minnie’s] kindness, and tender sympathy, do I owe much.”22 Because Minnie treated Elizabeth “like a sister,”23 and every freedom that was within her power to grant, she freely did.
With her banishment from Seventh Ward, Elizabeth had lost access not only to her former friends but also all her things. She later learned that after McFarland had taken her to Eighth Ward, he’d gone directly to her room on Seventh and searched roughly through her possessions, possibly looking for any copies of the reproof she might have made. Finding none, he’d nevertheless not allowed her trunk to be sent on, instead dispatching it and all its contents to the hospital’s luggage room. And there the trunk had stayed. Elizabeth was not allowed to have it with her on Eighth, nor was she permitted her own combs and mirrors, her private pitcher and bowl, her stationery, her towels. The deprivation she’d anticipated the night she’d moved wards was complete. She had been “stripped of every comfort or convenience.”24
Though Minnie couldn’t get her back her pitcher, she did at least allow Elizabeth to keep a chamber pot for her sole use, and this Elizabeth used for her own daily sponge bath; she tied a scarlet string around its handle to differentiate it from the other night pails. Each morning, her “feelings of delicacy revolted from the gaze”25 of her roommates, who used to watch her with focused interest as she bathed her own body, but having no choice in the matter, she persevered regardless.
Other liberties granted by Minnie were greater. One afternoon, she snuck Elizabeth out of the ward and took her to the trunk room itself. Elizabeth was allowed to select any items of clothing she wished to have with her, and Minnie also let her take her sewing box, which contained a three-bladed pocketknife, scissors, and the gold spectacles Elizabeth wore for close work. Minnie also found a chair for her—an item usually banned on the ward as it could too readily become a weapon—and even let her have access to a Bible so she could maintain her daily devotions.
However, Elizabeth found that Bridget and others would often interrupt her prayers. She begged of the attendants the privilege of sitting in a side room to pray; this wish was granted, as long as she left the door open. Although this meant other Eighth Ward patients wandered in, it was so much quieter than the busy dorm that Elizabeth accepted the offer gratefully.
She was sitting there one morning, on her special chair, when Jenny Haslett came creeping in. Jenny was the woman Elizabeth had heard crying at night for her Willie; Minnie had confided that Jenny had been driven mad by “disappointed affection.”26
Elizabeth found her pitiable. She was only eighteen but a “human wreck of existence.”27 Though her hair had been shorn off upon her arrival at the asylum, she remained in Elizabeth’s eyes “a handsome, delicate girl.”28
That morning, Jenny curled up at Elizabeth’s feet while she read her Bible. Soon, she began to play innocently with the trimming on Elizabeth’s dress, flicking the fabric back and forth. Jenny was often quite childlike in her ways. Her simple actions that morning perhaps reminded Elizabeth of her own children, who now seemed so very far away.