McFarland considered restraint “an absolute essential in any form of associated treatment,”29 in direct contrast to some other doctors who believed that “restraints and neglect may be considered synonymous.”30 But McFarland claimed the restraints used at Jacksonville were “so simple and light as hardly deserve the name.”31
Yet it wasn’t him who usually applied them; attendants formed the frontline. Although the superintendent conceded he was “fully alive to the abuses”32 that could follow, he still considered restraints “both justifiable and necessary” and thought those who objected “over-sensitive.”
As a woman, Elizabeth may have seen restraints being used far more often than she would have on a male ward. As occurred with the prescription of drugs, there could be a gender difference in the way restraints were applied. One superintendent revealed that in his asylum, restraint was “rarely found necessary among males.”33 In contrast, “from five to ten females usually wore the camisole.”34
Elizabeth observed with concern that the jackets were not only used on violent patients. In fact, sometimes the more aggressive patients were left to roam free while other, quieter patients who had simply made some misstep, acting against their attendants in some way, were restrained as punishment. She came to realize that “abused patients was the rule at that hospital, while those justly and kindly treated were the exceptions.”35
It was even worse than she had thought.
Elizabeth Packard started to conceive a strategy to address the situation. She’d partly found her transfer to Eighth Ward so shocking because she’d had no concept of the reality of that world. She’d always thought that an asylum would be as its etymology suggested: a sanctuary. She’d had no idea of the cruelty, horror, and deprivation that really went on. “The working of this Institution is so carefully covered up,” she thought, “and so artfully concealed from the public eye, that the external world knows nothing of the ‘hidden life of the prisoner’ within.”36
If only, she thought, someone could reveal it.
Perhaps that person could be her…
She started to plot. She came up with a plan: “the journal of an eyewitness taken on the spot.”37 It would be “a secret journal of daily events, just as they occurred.”38
She had no paper. She had no pen. But she had a mind and eyes and a passionate will. She was going to write her way out of this hellhole—if it was the last thing she did.
“It shall be one of the highest aspirations of my earth-life, to expose these evils for the purpose of remedying them,” she announced. “It shall be said of me, ‘She hath done what she could.’”39
She simply couldn’t wait to get started.
CHAPTER 21
She became a magpie, a squirrel, a spy. An old pen, carelessly discarded by a doctor, became a prize, a nub of pencil a treasure true. Some other patients were still allowed the privilege of newspapers; Elizabeth would tear the margins from them to scribble along those blank edges. Even before she came to the asylum, she’d always crammed her words onto the page—writing north, south, east, and west if necessary. That habit now stood her in good stead. “I put a wonderful amount of matter on a very small surface,”1 she later said with pride.
A letter written by Elizabeth in 1846, showing how she excelled at squeezing words onto a page
Yet it still wasn’t enough. She still had more to say, more to record. Around this time, Elizabeth was permitted to leave the ward to sew for the asylum under Mrs. Hosmer’s direction. She never mentioned being able to reconnect with her Seventh Ward friends, so perhaps—it seems likely—her visits to the sewing room were scheduled so their paths never crossed. It is not known why this potential privilege was restored, but maybe it wasn’t seen as one. Elizabeth herself said it was only through her unpaid labor that she could “buy the privilege of exchanging the putrid, loathsome air of the ward for the more wholesome, purer atmosphere of the sewing room.”2 She made a minimum of one vest or pair of pants daily. But at least it got her out.
And there was a benediction to be found in the company of Mrs. Hosmer. The sewing room directress, Elizabeth said, was “the medium of some of my choicest social blessings.”3
Though Mrs. Hosmer had correctly predicted that Elizabeth’s behavior on Seventh Ward would eventually get her in trouble, she still viewed the change in her friend’s circumstances with concern. “I have had eyes to see, and a heart to feel,”4 she later wrote. It perhaps reminded her of her own sister’s plight; she’d once been forced to write to McFarland during her sister’s stay with him to beg him to better the conditions. “The pain I feel when I think of my sister [in the] situation as I found her,” she wrote, “do say you will remove her. I can I will pay for better accomodations [sic]… think could you be happy to hav[e] your sister there.”5