Elizabeth was staying put. The only question was: What would she do next?
CHAPTER 23
When the breakfast bell rang at 5:30 a.m., Elizabeth Packard arose in her private room on Eighth. She knelt on her carpet to pray, drank a tumbler of rainwater, and quickly washed her head, hands, and face before dressing. A lot had changed since Mrs. McFarland had become matron, and one such thing was that the wards now all had bathtubs. This had not only relieved Elizabeth from her relentless cycle of sponge-bathing her fellow patients—because the attendants could now more easily wash them and did—but it had also changed her own daily routine. She saved her bathing until midmorning now, when she would take a cold bath for its refreshing qualities.
After breakfast, Elizabeth invited the ladies on her ward to join her for prayer circle. McFarland hadn’t stopped her when she’d defiantly started these up again—because he could see for himself he had no need for concern. They weren’t the collegiate, disruptive sessions of old; to Elizabeth’s disappointment, only one or two patients came and, sometimes, none at all.
That was because the makeup of her fellow patients was now completely different, at McFarland’s especial direction. The year before, the new west wing for women had finally opened, and the doctor had shaken up the classification of the female wards, changing which women lived where. On Eighth, the most dangerous patients, such as Mrs. Triplet, had been removed, while others, more capable, had been dispersed to other wards. Things had taken a while to settle, but Elizabeth now resided on Eighth Ward with “a quiet class of maniacs.”1
To her, it still seemed something of a misnomer （“Quiet maniacs!” she wrote. “Quiet thunder! Quiet hurricane!”2）， but even she conceded that with the violent patients removed, her circumstances had improved. In addition, her private room was a pleasant one that looked out toward the front of the asylum; it even had a view of distant Illinois College. She had her own easy chair and footstool, a dressing table and her own trunk of clothes, on which she’d embroidered a pretty cushioned seat.
Yet these furnishings, while attractive, were merely an external benefit: a gilding of the bars on her cage, which could not conceal the unforgiving steel beneath. Elizabeth wasn’t fooled by them. She saw too often the harsh reality of asylum life, which no comfy cushioned seat could soften.
In a way, the removal of the violent patients had only made that harsh reality clearer. Now surrounded by solely quiet patients, there should have been no need, in her view, for the attendants to rebuke or punish them. Yes, they were sick and could sometimes be difficult, but insanity wasn’t a crime. However, over the past year or so, the abuse the patients suffered had increased rather than decreased.
It was now the worst it had ever been.
A change in personnel was partly to blame. The Tenney sisters no longer looked after Elizabeth, and the replacements McFarland had managed to hire were neither as sensitive nor as kind. So bad had the situation become, in fact, that Mrs. Hosmer had left the hospital. The directress later said she’d worked at the asylum “until my soul has been pierced with cries for mercy.”3 When she could bear it no longer, she left.
She was lucky to have had the choice. There was no such option for Elizabeth.
Instead, she was forced to watch as her fellow patients were beaten, choked, and punished daily. Elizabeth being Elizabeth, she tried to intervene. On one occasion, she’d heard loud screams coming from a dormitory and rushed in to find a beefy attendant wrestling an already injured woman into a straitjacket.
“What is the matter?” Elizabeth had asked. “Why are you putting the straight-jacket on that woman?”4
But the attendant hadn’t answered. Instead, she’d shouted, “Mrs. Packard, leave this room!”
Elizabeth had obediently taken a single step back over the threshold, but she kept on asking questions. As long as she had a tongue in her head, she always would. “Why are you putting her into a straight-jacket? What has she done?”
At this impertinence, the attendant reacted strongly. She “came at me in a great rage,” Elizabeth recalled, shocked at the direct attack. The woman grabbed Elizabeth brutally by the arm, dragged her along the corridor, and locked her in her own room so she could interfere no more.
But such attempts to control her only increased Elizabeth’s desire to help. “I am becoming so extremely sensitive to wrong and abuse, that I cannot, nor shall not, witness it without interference, even if you put me into fetters for it,”5 she announced. When she’d first arrived at the asylum, Elizabeth’s shocked focus had been on those women she thought sane who’d been committed to the asylum and those travesties of justice. Now, however, she found her eyes opened to another field of battle—that of protecting the genuinely mentally ill from abuse.