It was a view in keeping with those of his peers. “The best attendants are but human,” another superintendent wrote, “and their mercy endureth not forever, and after much long-suffering the time is too apt to come when they are perfectly convinced that a little wholesome chastisement is just the thing required.”16
McFarland claimed he was powerless to stop such abuse. “No humane regulations, and no possible vigilance are proof against such perversions,” he wrote easily. “The temptation to the abuse is ever at hand, and its discovery well-nigh an impossibility.”17
But it would not have been an impossibility to discover if he’d actually listened when his patients complained. Yet he was deaf to all their protests. Because they were supposedly insane, he simply assumed they were “never to be believed”18 and denied them “the right of petition and investigation”19 when they made allegations of abuse. “The remark is perfectly safe,” the doctor wrote, “and not in the slightest intended as a professional vindication, that in more than nine cases in the ten, where persons lately resident abound in complaints…it will be found that there are in the individual, still existing evidences of mental unsoundness.”20
McFarland was not the only psychiatrist to think so. One of his peers announced that “in proportion as a patient’s recovery is complete and permanent, he will be likely to speak well of the institution; [but] if he still has any degree of insanity about him…he is more likely to speak ill.”21 It was a catch-22: the patients were mad if they complained, sane if they didn’t. McFarland’s asylum rules stated clearly that attendants should only be made subjects of official complaint “on the best assured grounds.”22
A patient’s allegation of abuse was never that.
“Giving vent to indignation in insane asylums is like trying to breathe under water,”23 Elizabeth wrote, eerily invoking the scenes of worst abuse. The women had been put “where [their] word is not regarded,”24 so any complaints were treated as “mere phantoms of a diseased imagination.”25 Another patient wrote, “It is of no use to appeal to [Dr. McFarland], while a patient there. He seems to act as though patients had no rights… We feel that we are a despised class, to be tolerated, rather than be respected.”26
Elizabeth put it even more simply. “What is an insane person’s testimony worth?” she asked, then succinctly answered: “Nothing.”27
That was why, in June 1862, she’d decided to call in reinforcements. Mrs. Hosmer may have departed, but Elizabeth had other friends in the hospital upon whom she could call, and she’d concluded it was time she did.
That day, Elizabeth continued her daily routine as normal so that no one would be alarmed by any deviation from her schedule. Her day was so monotonous she could have set her gold watch by it. “The record of one day is a record of all,”28 she wrote, and each day was as painfully long as the last. “You cannot imagine how long time seems here,” she wrote. “One day seems like a month elsewhere.”29
On this day, however, she was likely glad of the routine, because it potentially provided cover for her other plans. So as normal, she took her bath at 11:00 a.m. and then commenced her gymnastics. Taking a deep breath, she stretched her arms above her head to take a firm grip on the ledge of her door frame. She hung there, legs dangling, stretching out her abdomen and arms, for as long as her muscles could last.
She performed these exercises twice a day: a range of calisthenic movements she’d developed to tone her body. She felt she needed to stay well for what she called “this field of action.”30 Like a soldier training for a war, Elizabeth was ruthless in her pursuit of fitness, knowing a tough fight lay ahead.
But in truth, the fight was already here. And on this day in particular, Elizabeth Packard was determined to wage war.
Because it was June 18, 1862: exactly two years to the day since she’d been brought to the asylum.
She planned to mark the anniversary with rebellion indeed.
CHAPTER 24
She pressed her pen into the paper. “An appeal in behalf of the insane,” she wrote. “Mr. Editor: It is our desire to lay before the public, through your paper, the manner the insane are treated in Jacksonville, Insane Asylum, Illinois.”1
She was writing to the editor of the New York Independent, a leading liberal newspaper. She was writing to the Chicago papers too. But crucially, she was not writing under her own name.
This appeal purportedly came from the pen of Mrs. Celia and Mr. James Coe, the asylum’s married cooks, who’d long been Elizabeth’s allies. It’s not clear exactly whose idea it was, although Elizabeth later said she wrote it “at the request of Mr. and Mrs. Coe.”2 They felt their own knowledge of the goings-on at the asylum was a “burden”3 on their consciences. Knowing of Elizabeth’s eloquence, they’d asked her to help alleviate that burden as they blew the whistle on the abuse to the press.