The law under which he’d asked the trustees to release her—the law under which she had just been released—was one in which patients were deemed incurable. Though McFarland actually disputed the idea professionally that such a distinction could ever be drawn, he’d happily made the call in Elizabeth’s case. In later years, he would release homicidal patients whom he believed were “at any time liable…to repeat the butchery”7 as sane, but Elizabeth was deemed more afflicted with insanity than even these people.
That past September, when the patient herself had requested to speak to the trustees, he’d leapt at the chance for her to do so, giving his “free and full consent.”8
Anything to see the back of her.
He’d wanted Elizabeth gone even though, to his professional frustration, he still hadn’t found that source of intellectual delusion that he believed must lie at the heart of her moral perversity.
“I do not think that for two years of the closest study I could discover any intellectual impairment at all,” he now confided in his fellow doctors. “[Though] her hatred of her husband had something diabolical about it…the closest study could not discover any intellectual impairment.”9
But then, at that same trustee meeting at which he’d hoped she’d be discharged, she’d said a very curious thing. She’d talked about how she was “a spiritual woman—a ‘temple of the Holy Ghost.’”10
McFarland’s ears had pricked up. She thought she was the Holy Ghost?
The following day, he’d asked for a copy of her statement, wanting to read again exactly what she’d said. When she’d suggested preparing it for the press, he’d enthusiastically agreed and even urged her to add to it: “Write what you please!”11 When she’d come to him with her idea for her book, it was as if all his Christmases had come at once.
Because for two years, she’d managed to keep him distant from her delusion, “dexterously”12 avoiding giving him the evidence he’d so keenly sought. But McFarland believed that patients like Elizabeth “may utter almost any continuation of spoken language without betraying themselves—[but] the severer ordeal of writing, alone, [will serve] to discover the diseased mental processes.”13
He’d therefore given her permission to write whatever she wished. He gave her all the paper she required. It was, in his mind, a rope with which she might hang herself. He told her attendants not to disturb her.
He wanted nothing to get in the way of his revenge.
And it was revenge. Because his decision to let her write was not only prompted by professional curiosity, hoping to discover the cause of her perceived illness. McFarland admitted: “As there always will be some, even of fair intelligence in other things, who will be led…to believe that she is not insane, I deemed it best to let her continue her strain of writing.”14 He wanted her to write a book that would “convince the most incredulous”15 she was mad. Because she was simply too convincing in asserting her sanity to others: too eloquent, too compelling. He needed a gun of his own to shoot her down.
And Elizabeth herself, in McFarland’s view, had duly loaded it and put it straight into his hands. As he’d read the erratic, stream-of-consciousness manuscript she’d subsequently produced, he’d felt vindicated. In his view, she had proven her insanity “most effectually.”16 He considered her writings “absurd and childish.”17
“Are not women citizens?” she’d written. “Are not their rights worth protecting?”18
“Put woman into your ballot-boxes, your legislatures, your senates, your Congress, your president’s chair.”19
No wonder Elizabeth had felt the doctor was “unconcerned about what I write, as if his character didn’t depend upon the opinions of one of his patients.”20 In his view, it didn’t. She was insane, and she could write what she wished, because no one would give weight to her opinions.
No one ever would.
Yet the clear evidence of her insanity was not the only boon to be discovered in those twenty-five hundred pages he had patiently plowed his way through.
He also thought he’d discovered her primary delusion. He took pleasure in revealing it to his peers, like a magician demonstrating a dark trick: “The delusion was that, in the Trinity, distinctions of sex had to exist…and that she was the Holy Ghost… It appeared…this delusion had possessed her…giving origin to all this perversity of conduct.”21 He ultimately concluded, “Her insanity consists in a thoroughly diseased conception of her own powers as one having supernatural attributes.”22