CHAPTER 26
Elizabeth held her breath as she waited for the doctor’s response.
It was early September 1862. For the past few months, in keeping with her new campaign, she’d been patiently encouraging McFarland to be a kinder, more sympathetic superintendent—and she felt it was working. For example, Elizabeth had long petitioned for Miss Smith to be removed from Eighth Ward; while McFarland hadn’t fired her, Smith had recently been moved to the ironing room. The situation on Eighth had improved considerably, as eighteen-year-old Adelaide Tryon, “a reasonable and kind attendant,”1 replaced her.
Elizabeth felt her plan was slowly succeeding. A “new spirit seemed to hold [the doctor],” she observed. “I began to hope he was treating the patients on the principles of justice.”2
So in September 1862, she’d seized her chance. She’d asked McFarland if she could meet the hospital’s trustees at their quarterly meeting, due to be held at the hospital in a few days’ time, to present her case for her release to them—in person. To her astonishment, the doctor gave his “free and full consent.”3
He even gave her the paper she needed to prepare her presentation.
What a major deal it was for him to have said yes cannot be understated. Elizabeth had tried desperately to gain proper access to the trustees over the past two years and three months but had always failed. On one occasion, she’d managed to pass them a petition as they walked through her hall; on another, she’d crushed a secret letter into the hand of one of their wives. Both documents had protested her sanity and appealed for her immediate release; both had been resolutely ignored. The problem, naturally, was the entrenched perspective that all who had been committed to the asylum must be insane, and that any patient who protested her sanity was sicker than the rest.
“It is a rule sanctioned by the highest authorities,” wrote one of McFarland’s peers, “that a patient cannot be considered as recovered who does not fully and willingly recognize the fact that he has been insane.”4
The trustees were the sole overseers of McFarland’s work. There were six of them. Every ninety days, they held a quarterly meeting at which they inspected the hospital and determined, with McFarland’s input, which patients were ready for release.
Yet their so-called inspections could not be called thorough. More time was spent admiring the workings of the handsome farm outside and partaking in the dining pleasures of the doctors’ table than in visiting the wards. Even then, they inspected only those “it was thought proper to visit,”5 with staff briefed days beforehand so that “every [strait]jacket [could be] taken off, every strap hid, and the patients compelled by fair or foul means, generally the latter, to…act as decorous as their poor crazy brains will allow.”6
The trustees themselves conceded that they knew “no more than any other citizens”7 about the workings of the wards. As it was, they’d been advised to treat any complaints they received with skepticism. The received wisdom of the age, as dispensed by leading superintendents, was that patients were “liars by nature”8 and had a “tendency to have a hostile attitude toward the institution.”9 The Jacksonville board therefore attached “but small importance”10 to patients’ claims, due to the “unreliability of this species of testimony.”11 They preferred to take McFarland at his word; trustees at another asylum openly admitted their superintendent “had great influence on their report.”12 Trustees were not only “intimate friends”13 of the doctors “but relatives by affinity.”14
Despite their evident bias, Elizabeth was still thrilled to have been given a chance to appeal to them in person. Until now, McFarland’s had been the sole hand in which her fate had been held. But the trustees had the power to release patients too. She just needed to be given a chance—a chance that was now, finally, within her grasp—and they would surely see the truth: that she was “imprisoned…simply for claiming a right to my own thoughts.”15
On September 4, she dressed carefully, picking out one of her nicer outfits from the handful in her trunk. As it was a hot day, she chose a white lawn dress with sky-blue trimmings and finished the look with a “tasteful head-dress”16 placed atop her neatly coiffed hair. As she settled it into place, she was struck by a “queenlike feeling”17—a sentiment only emphasized as McFarland, in a smart summer suit, appeared at her door to escort her to the meeting.
He offered her his arm. Elizabeth took it. It was a half-remembered action from a long-ago time. To take a gentleman’s arm and be attentively ushered through those long corridors felt like the life of a woman from a completely different era. She was certainly not the same woman inside. Yet as her heels clicked on the hard floor, suppressed memories came flooding to the fore, and she felt irrepressible impatience and hard-won hope bubbling up. “I have been like the soldier so long trying to keep down an inordinate desire to see my children once more,” she thought, “that the least probability of the closing of the campaign almost fills me with ecstasy.”18