Then, triumphantly, they would be proved right. “It was some months before we were so convinced of his true condition, as to have been able…to testify in a court, that he was insane, but he ultimately demented,”10 one revealed with satisfaction. Another doctor said of a female patient that “although he had no doubt of her insanity, she was in the house for six months before the development of her malady.”11 McFarland himself put it this way: “sooner or later,”12 a patient would develop “well marked insanity of mind and habit [to] satisfy the most scrupulous as to their condition.”13
It was just as Elizabeth had written in her reproof: “No human being can be subjected to the process to which you subject them here, without being in great danger of becoming insane.”14
McFarland may not have intentionally had a plan to make Elizabeth mad.
But that didn’t mean it might not happen anyway.
And the doctor’s theories about treating her type of case seemed destined to make it even more likely. McFarland considered patients like her “less able than children to enjoy the unrestrained exercise of the prerogatives of sane persons.”15 They were “less suitable subjects for the enjoyment of the pleasures of liberty and the unlimited society of others, than those in whom the power of reasoning may be much less perfect.”16 That was why he’d applied such stiff constraints now that he’d moved Elizabeth to Eighth Ward. In his opinion, she was not a suitable subject for society and unconstrained freedom.
Because he wasn’t only looking out for her but also the others around her. As he’d noted in his letter to Theophilus, Elizabeth had a truly brilliant mind—and that made her dangerous. “Being capable of reasoning logically, and, in some instances, with surprising clearness of thought; and having their peculiarities of conduct so under control as to deceive the superficial observer, they…too often enlist the sympathies of well-meaning philanthropists,”17 McFarland wrote of her class of patients. He’d identified as early as August that this troublesome inmate possessed “an artfulness in her play upon the sympathies of others that few can resist.”18 That was partly why he’d been so worried about that prayer circle and the way she’d interacted with his staff. That was why her inclusion of collected quotes in the reproof would have been a final straw.
He’d had no choice but to cut her off from all her former associates. Though she had at first been deemed fit for Seventh Ward, her subsequent rabble-rousing, spreading “discontent and disaffection”19 everywhere she went, had made her position untenable. Her persuasive and impassioned interference in the lives of others was simply too great for McFarland to ignore; this was why she’d been moved.
She may well have been mad in his mind, but she clearly had influence and eloquence—a frightening combination in the wrong woman’s hands.
But at the present time, in the wake of his intervention, McFarland must have been pleased to see the way it was going on Eighth Ward. After all, she was now shut up there with only lunatics for company. It would surely be a challenge, even for Elizabeth Packard, to sow her insurgent seeds in that stony field.
Later—much later—McFarland would be challenged directly on how he could have believed, by his own self-stated standards of defining moral insanity, that Elizabeth was insane. She had shown no intellectual impairment. On the contrary, she was intelligent and bright.
The doctor, perhaps tellingly, would choose to dodge the question.
It would be asked again.
And finally he would reply with a calm, conceited faith—in himself. “I believed that delusion existed, and that I should find it.”20
Now, like his peers before him, all he had to do was wait.
CHAPTER 20
The bell cut through the dark morning, summoning the Eighth Ward patients to rise, if not shine. Elizabeth pulled herself blearily upright, a “bad taste”1 in her mouth. In her old life, she had always loved her sleep, but lately even this escape into unconsciousness afforded little respite. Sleep was neither as quiet nor as refreshing as it once had been, and it was not all to do with the disturbances in the dorm.
She began her sponge bath, concealing her body as much as she could from the prying eyes of her roommates. With no mirrors on the ward, she could not complete her toilette as she once had but tried her best each morning to maintain her appearance, knowing a slippery slope awaited if she didn’t.
It was strange, never seeing her reflection. She had only an old picture of herself in her mind now, but it was fading by the day. It was like the bruises on her face and arms from the patients’ angry blows. Each day, their vibrant color grew weaker and more washed out until they appeared only as insubstantial shadows.