She was repeatedly threatened for speaking up for others—“Mrs. Packard, stop your voice! If you speak another word…I shall put a straight jacket on you!”6 Meanwhile, her compassionate act of sneaking a bit of johnnycake to a patient who’d been “locked in her room to suffer starvation”7 saw Elizabeth herself threatened with solitary confinement, the words “accompanied with the flourish of a butcher knife over my head.”8 Given solitary was described by one doctor as “calculated to convert the sane man into a lunatic,”9 she had a lucky escape.
On that occasion at least.
The violence had grown worse and worse. One day, Elizabeth had been forced to bind a patient’s throat after an attendant had gouged a hole in it with her fingernail while choking her. She’d used a piece of her own linen for the dressing, carefully binding the wound of the young woman, who was only twenty. So stunned had she been by the violence that afterward, Elizabeth kept the cloth “red with the blood of this innocent girl, as proof of this kind of abuse in Jacksonville Insane Asylum.”10
It joined with her diary as a record of all she was witnessing.
Yet choking and beating, straitjackets and solitary, turned out to be child’s play for some of the new attendants. Ironically, the very worst abuse the patients suffered was that enabled by the arrival of the bathtubs. These should have been such a source of comfort to the women: a chance to be clean, to be human, to wash away the pain and hurt. Instead, they became a place of torture.
Elizabeth’s room was located opposite the bathroom. As both rooms had ventilation windows above their doors, it was easy for her to hear what was going on. One late night, she heard a new patient being inducted into the regime. When the patient wouldn’t stop screaming, frightened by the asylum and the screen room she’d already been sent to, she was dragged into the bathroom.
Elizabeth heard as her body was manhandled into a tub filled with cold water. Yet the shock of this unexpected bath “so convulsed her in agony that she now screamed louder than before.”11
But not for much longer. As Elizabeth listened, body stiff beneath her sheets, the woman’s voice bubbled into blank silence…as she was held beneath the water. Nothing was more terrible than that silence, Elizabeth thought, after all the words and screams that had come before. The woman’s voice—and life?—were cut off abruptly, blanketed into oblivion by a veil of water that kept her mute. Elizabeth held her breath, only hoping the woman had been able to do the same before her head was plunged below the surface. She listened intently, hoping to catch some small sound that would let her know the woman was still alive.
After a period of silence, the water sloshed, and Elizabeth heard a “piteous” cry for “help! help!” Clearly chastened, now broken in—just as had been designed—the woman promised meekly in a rasping voice that she would not scream anymore.
Yet her words cut no ice with the attendants. They were determined to make it “a thorough ‘subduing,’” to ensure this new patient knew who was in charge. And so, repeatedly, as Elizabeth listened in the opposite room, she heard the terrifying tandem sounds of water and no words, water and no words, as the woman was held beneath the water once again. And again. And again.
And again.
Nor was that the only way to skin a cat. Sometimes the bathwater was hot, so it scalded. Sometimes the water was poured in a pail above their heads. Sometimes the patients were placed in the bath with “their hands and feet tied, and if they resisted, a straitjacket was placed upon them.”12 The attendants would then hold their heads beneath the water “as long as it was safe to leave them.” They’d be lifted out only to “cast the water from their stomach,” then the same process would continue “as long as the patient was thought able to bear it.”
This punishment was administered when the women disobeyed attendants’ orders to stop talking, when patients modestly wished to bathe alone, and when patients spoke back. Even the attendants themselves conceded they used it “for a slight offense,” such as “silly behaviour and laughing.”13
Elizabeth had tried appealing to McFarland about this torture. He seemed all too conscious of it, later writing of the “convenience”14 of the bathtub as “an engine of petty tyranny.” “How many scores is it made to pay off; how many sly grudges to satisfy?” he asked rhetorically, describing it as “a Damocles’ sword, always suspended” above his patients’ heads. Yet he defended his staff, saying the use of physical force was “but to confess to the fallibility of human nature.”15