As had happened on Seventh Ward, Elizabeth began to pray with her friends, although, cleverly, it was not as formalized an arrangement as before. But they lived the experience of Eighth Ward together. “I have wept with her sorrows,” Elizabeth wrote of Emily, who’d been committed to the asylum by her family, who did not want to care for her. “I have cried over her griefs and wrongs which it was beyond my power to help. Hundreds of times have we prayed to the same Father…confidently hoping that He would…deliver us out of the power of our persecuting kindred.”18 When Emily had a seizure, it was Elizabeth who nursed her now.
And Elizabeth found their collective strength helped her. “In alleviating their burdens and sorrows my own became bearable,”19 she said, almost feeling the weight lift. So she went further, caressing patients if they’d let her, allowing them to feel that human touch. She even permitted that frightened, fluttering bird, Miss Weaver, to climb into her own narrow bed at night when she was scared. There, Elizabeth wrote, Miss Weaver could “hug me still more closely, and I slept…in her amorous embrace. She dared not to trust herself to sleep, unless I was by her side.”20
Nor did Elizabeth simply soothe and support her friends. “When we suffered any unusual abuse,” recalled a fellow Eighth Ward patient of Elizabeth, “it was very often said, ‘I’ll tell Mrs. Packard of this.’ We knew our rights would find an able advocate in our firm and gentle friend.”21
Because Elizabeth had realized something about herself, perhaps for the first time: “I always stand up for the oppressed.”22 She said she never regretted giving McFarland the reproof. Though it had led her here, to this place of horror, not only had it been the right thing to do, but now she could help these women too.
She started to think more shrewdly about McFarland’s removal of her writing privileges. It was a particular punishment for her; others were not treated the same. Elizabeth therefore deduced of the doctor’s decision, “Mine was the only pen he feared amongst his patients.”23 She considered that distinction an honor.
Her feelings for McFarland at this time had turned 180 degrees from her previous admiration. Now, “even the sight of the man, or the sound or sight of his name, was instinctively and inseparably associated with horror.”24 She would dread the sound of his footsteps in the hall, finding his presence so distressingly painful she couldn’t even speak to him. She would turn away, mute, when he entered her dormitory, refusing even to exchange pleasantries.
Her discourtesy was no doubt noted as an unnatural lack of feminine friendliness.
But Elizabeth found that now the battle lines had been drawn, it made her purpose clearer. “I must not turn back,” she wrote, “but face this new enemy I have called into the field.”25 McFarland might have hoped that her removal to Eighth Ward would suppress her spirit, but Elizabeth was finding the opposite was true.
“O, Dr. McFarland,” she said with patronizing clarity, “you cannot kill a spirit; it lives after all you have done to destroy its existence.”26 Though she’d initially found the transfer to Eighth Ward the hardest thing she’d faced, she’d now discovered that “I can live, move, breathe, and have a being, where I once thought I could not.”27
Yet to Elizabeth, simply living, moving, breathing, and being were not enough. An “aimless purpose”28 was of no account to her. She didn’t want her life to be solely about surviving, hanging on to make it through.
She wanted to make it count.
Being on Eighth Ward had been an eye-opener in countless ways. In particular, she regularly saw restraints applied to patients; these had barely been needed to control the cutout dolls of Seventh Ward. She had a front-row seat as women were habitually bundled into the incongruently named camisoles—straitjackets—their arms forced inside elongated cotton sleeves, crossed firmly in front of their bucking bodies, and drawn tightly away behind them, with a strong cord then used to secure them so they could not wriggle free. She saw how screen rooms were used: a form of solitary confinement in a small, uncomfortable room with an iron screen stretched across its window. Also at the staff’s disposal were crib bedsteads—wooden boxes with cot-like barred sides—wrist straps, muffs, and mittens.
Forms of restraint used in Illinois asylums in the mid-nineteenth century, including the “camisoles” Elizabeth frequently saw applied on Eighth Ward
The Jacksonville women were lucky at least that the array did not include the scold’s bridle: a metal muzzle with an iron bit that could be placed on a woman’s tongue to stop her from speaking. The most torturous types had a spike attached that would pierce her tongue if she tried. This device had been used to control women ever since the sixteenth century and was still being utilized in at least one provincial British asylum in 1858.