Sophia was soon reported as an “unmanageable, mischief-making patient.”20 Before October was out, she was banished to Fifth Ward, and Elizabeth lost yet another friend.
She watched her go with deep concern. Sophia’s unwarranted transfer to Fifth didn’t fit with her impression of McFarland as a changed man. Mrs. McFarland’s cruelty, too, was something new, though Elizabeth had noted that the closer she’d become to Annie’s husband, the colder the relationship between herself and the doctor’s wife. “She don’t like me these days at all,”21 she noted. No special jellies arrived in her private room on Eighth anymore, and she overheard Annie making fun of her book. “She calls me the ‘poor deluded woman’ now,”22 Elizabeth said sadly.
Her thoughts stumbled on a rock as she considered why, but she did not peer too closely at it. “I wonder,” she thought, “if my ‘delusion’ lies in my improved opinion respecting her husband’s character?”23
But she couldn’t let herself dwell on that; she had a book to publish. At McFarland’s suggestion, she’d divided it into parts, as publishing the whole would have been enough to “frighten away the practical reader.”24 She’d decided to focus on getting only the first volume into print. McFarland had reportedly agreed to fund its publication, just as he’d previously offered to pay for the handbill printing of the documents she’d written for the trustees; the book had now supplanted these in her priorities. As the fall days passed by outside, Elizabeth focused all her time on neatly copying out the first volume, preparing it for the press.
Her hope was that it could be printed prior to the trustees’ meeting in early December. That way, it could both support her appeal for immediate release and allow her instantly to draw financial and legal aid from it once free. McFarland, as her sole patron, became ever more important to her.
Which was why Elizabeth was so troubled when Sophia finally returned from Fifth Ward in mid-November 1862. Oh, what an unexpected joy to walk into the dining hall that dinnertime to see her! The women stared at each other, eyes dancing even as their arms stayed still. Both longed to embrace and “weep with joy”25 at their reunion, but they both knew better than to show it. The surveillance of their attendants was too close; they would only be punished.
They must have been more successful at concealing their emotions than even they had thought, for to their mutual surprise, they were granted permission to sit next to each other. Side by side, they “conversed in very low tones, so as not to disturb anyone, and not to permit our attendant to suspect that we were particularly happy.”26
In whispered words, Sophia shared the trauma of her recent experience. The cold potatoes stuck in Elizabeth’s throat as she listened. It seemed Fifth Ward had remained the lowest ward, both figuratively and literally, even after the reclassification of the patients. Located at the bottom of the hospital, it had low ceilings so that “there wasn’t quite air space enough for the patients.”27 Some rooms had only half doors, the upper part being made of an open iron frame so attendants could keep their eyes on the violent patients within. Books were banned. Sophia described it as a “charnel house of human woe.”28
Elizabeth now learned that her campaign to clean up Eighth Ward had not touched Fifth. Sophia had spent the past twenty days living among “very filthy women,”29 whose garments were “indecently torn,”30 and who sat with puddles of “unfragrant water on the floor under their feet.”31 Yet she’d been even more appalled to realize that the women’s faces were often blackened not with dirt but with bruises, for Fifth Ward was where Lizzie Bonner held sway, and she was as fearsome as ever.
Sophia revealed that Elizabeth “did not see the worst forms of this cruelty.”32 Elizabeth had by now made such an impression on the staff and was so well known for speaking out against injustice that they often self-censored their behavior in her presence, anticipating her impassioned rebuke. But on Fifth, Sophia had seen patients abused every single day.
“Sometimes it appeared that I must turn away, that I could not endure to see human beings thus abused,” she remembered sadly. “But the next thought was one of self-accusation for being thus tender to my own feelings. ‘If these sufferers can bear to feel it, I can and will bear to see it…for if I do not see these things, I cannot testify that I did. So I will even look on,’”33 she’d vowed.
When she’d finally summoned the courage to threaten to tell McFarland of the abuse—perhaps drawing on memories of Mrs. Packard to take that leap—Miss Bonner had merely responded, “Dr. McFarland knows all about it…he tells me to manage the patients here by my own judgment, and I intend to do as he tells me. So you can mind your own business.”34