With their liberty to work and walk all over the hospital, the Coes had seen far more abuse than even Elizabeth knew of. They were particularly concerned about a woman who worked on Fifth Ward, Lizzie Bonner, a “large, coarse, stout Irish woman, stronger than most men,”4 whose face had “an expression of stern repulsiveness”5 and who possessed a ferocious temper. She kept her bunch of heavy keys on a cord around her waist—but this merely gave her easy access to a ready weapon.
“I have many times, seen even tardy or reluctant obedience punished with fearful severity,” one patient later wrote of being “cared for” by Bonner. “I have seen the attendant strike and unmercifully beat on the [patient’s] head…with a bunch of heavy keys…leaving their faces blackened and scarred for weeks. I have seen her twist their arms and cross them behind the back, tie them in that position, and then beat the victim till the other patients would cry out, begging her to desist… It was not rarely and occasionally, but hourly and continually, that these brutalities occurred.”6
Lizzie Bonner punishing patients
In the appeal to the newspaper editors, Celia Coe asked Elizabeth to include one particular instance of abuse she had witnessed.
[I] found Miss Bonah [sic]…using the patient’s head as a hammer, and her hair as a handle, and thus pounding the floor with it with the greatest violence…
“I will have satisfaction upon her!” she [said], “for she has got the devil in her and I mean to beat it out of her.”
She then persisted in putting on the [strait]jacket…and then she…dragged her across the hall to the bars, where she tied [her up]. And thus, having entirely disarmed her, she seized hold of the hair of her head again, and commenced beating the back of her head against the sharp corners of the bars—each blow inflicting a deep gash into her head, so that every blow was followed with blood splashing in every direction, besmearing the floor and walls, and our own persons, and a pie I had in my hand, with human gore.7
It was vivid and brutal—but nothing less than the truth.
Elizabeth kept writing. She wrote of patients’ arms that had been dislocated by attendants; of dying patients given no comfort, their cruel treatment likely hastening their end; of patients choked “until their faces were black, and their tongues would hang out of their mouths”;8 of the bathtub torture she herself had heard.
“It is the artful Dr.’s policy to pronounce all the witnesses of these scenes of cruelty, as insane persons, hoping that this, his lying testimony in many cases, may outlaw them as witnesses against him, and his doings through his own attendants,”9 she wrote in the Coes’ voice, hoping that this appeal from asylum staff would be treated differently.
She and the Coes concluded their document, “May this mute appeal be responded to by the friends of humanity.”10 The Coes said they held themselves “in readiness to answer any inquiries which may be addressed to us.”11
Yet the post office address they gave was not in Jacksonville but Winchester, Virginia. They were going out in a blaze of glory, but they were nevertheless still going out. Like Mrs. Hosmer before them—who’d written upon her departure to both renowned mental-health campaigner Dorothea Dix and to the head of the asylum’s trustees to report the abuse she’d witnessed—the Coes had found the courage to speak publicly only as their term of employment came to an end.
Despite their imminent departure, Elizabeth bound up the handwritten appeal with careful fingers and a hopeful heart, having weighed each word to ensure it was as impactful as could be. Going to the press was a new development, but she anticipated it would make a difference. She’d threatened McFarland in her reproof with this very idea—“How would you like to see such facts as these in print?”12—and now, thanks to the Coes’ decision to go public, that day was closer than ever before. Surely, once the abuse was brought before the public, outrage would be such that an investigation would commence. And when those investigators threw open the heavy doors of the asylum and came crowding into the wards, they would find Elizabeth Packard, with her bloodstained rags and her scribbled scraps of diary, ready to tell all.
She thought often of what Mrs. Grere, one of her fellow patients, said: “If Dr. McFarland won’t do right, can’t he be made to do right by some power?”13
Elizabeth hoped the power of the press was what they’d all been waiting for.
CHAPTER 25
That summer of 1862, the papers were full of news about only one thing: the U.S. Civil War. It had been raging for fifteen months, defying the early predictions of those who’d thought it would be over in ninety days. As one citizen put it, “Madness was upon the people.”1 The lunatics were now not only held within the asylum but roaming free outside.