June 19, 2019 • 34 mins
After being forcibly admitted to a mental hospital by her husband, Elizabeth Packard began advocating for herself as well as the improvement of treatment in such facilities. After her release, she lobbied for reform to the asylum system.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, the production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
This is part two of our podcast on Packard Versus Packard,
(00:21):
which is when the awfulist Packard had his wife Elizabeth
institutionalized because in his words, she was insane. That was
not her opinion of it at all. Part one we
talked about the early lives of the two of them
and how they had an apparently happy and functional marriage
for about fifteen years that crumbled and became abusive and
(00:44):
then he, as I just said, had her involuntarily committed. Today,
we are going to pick up with Elizabeth's time in
this hospital. First, we're gonna set a little context about
the state of mental health treatment in the nineteenth century.
Some of that's really horrifying. Some of this language, like
we wouldn't necessarily throw around the word insane to describe
(01:06):
a person today. Things like that, uh, super common language
at the time. And um, you can probably understand this
episode without having heard part one. Um, but part one
is really a lot of the detail of how we
got to this point. So before the late eighteenth and
(01:27):
early nineteenth century, people with serious mental health illnesses in
the United States and Europe were generally placed into facilities
commonly called lunatic asylums, and these asylums were not about treatment.
They were essentially prisons. Patients were often put into restraints
and left there with little in the way of comfort
or care, and sometimes they were actively abused by the
(01:50):
staff or others living in the facility, and some of
these asylums were also tourist attractions, with visitors coming to
gawk at the patients, and the United States that started
to shift in the late seventeen hundreds and early eighteen hundreds.
The nation's first private mental hospital was the Asylum for
the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of their Reason,
(02:11):
also known as the Friends Hospital, which was opened by
Quakers in eighteen seventeen. The Friends Hospital focused on the
idea of moral treatment, which became the standard of care
and most mental hospitals by the middle of the nineteenth century.
The basic idea had been put into practice by physician
William Took at an asylum called The Retreat in York, England,
which opened in seventeen ninety six. Over the late seventeen
(02:34):
hundreds and early eighteen hundreds, physicians in Britain and France
continued to refine the retreats methods. Moral treatment focused on
the idea that an asylum should treat its patients humanely,
with the institution acting almost like a stern and paternalistic guardian.
Unlike these earlier lunatic asylums, patients weren't kept in restraints.
(02:55):
They were expected to live in a clean, orderly and
polite way and a strict and disciplined environment. Patients were
expected to do some chores around the building or the
grounds on a regular schedule to give them a sense
of purpose and to keep them on this predictable daily cycle.
Doctors might also prescribe treatments along a more medical model,
(03:15):
including drugs, hydrotherapy, exercise, things like that. In a lot
of ways, this was a big step forward from what
was common in lunatic asylums, but it turned out to
be hard to carry out in practice. Moral treatment was
only helpful for a relatively small number of patients. A
person who was mostly exhausted and stressed and needed time
to recuperate might leave the hospital feeling like their treatment
(03:38):
had cured them. But for many mental illnesses this just
was not the case. A patient with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder,
or depression or any number of other mental illnesses might
be helped to a degree by the predictable daily routine
in a calm and ordered setting, but moral treatment really
didn't address the illness itself. Also, many of the people
(03:59):
who wound up in these hospitals didn't have a mental illness.
The field of psychiatry was really in its infancy without
a clear sense of what was or wasn't a mental illness.
So people with drug and alcohol addictions, developmental disabilities, and epilepsy,
all kinds of other conditions wound up in mental hospitals,
and so did people who just weren't behaving as their
(04:21):
families or society expected them to. There weren't many of
these private hospitals at first. They were mostly in more
affluent areas and available to wealthier people, so most people
with mental illnesses that kept them from being able to
function in society were kept out of sight at home,
or if their families couldn't or wouldn't care for them,
(04:41):
they wound up in alms houses or even prisons. Care
Typically was not good in any of these scenarios. People
caring for family members at home might have good and
loving intentions, but there was so much stigma surrounding mental
illness and ideas that they were brought on by things
like possession, and a lot of different explanations for mental
(05:02):
illnesses that didn't amount to an illness, um that people
caring for family members were just as likely to be
abusive or neglectful. Prisons and alms houses were brutal and
degrading in general, and then on top of that, they
just were not equipped to handle the behaviors that came
along with untreated mental illnesses. This all started to shift
(05:23):
in the eighteen forties and fifties as reformers like Dorothea
Dix advocated for state funded asylums and better care within
those asylums. Most of these newly built asylums followed the
moral care model, and some existing state hospitals began using
it as well. New asylum buildings were typically designed according
to the Kirkbride Plan, developed by Dr Thomas Story Kirkbride.
(05:46):
They were divided into symmetrical wings and wards with lots
of fresh air and natural light. Reformers also advocated for
the idea that people with mental illnesses needed to be
cared for rather than simply locked away. But it turned
out that implementing the moral care model at all these
newly open hospitals could be really difficult. As the public
(06:07):
started to think of mental illness as something that required
treatment at a hospital, admissions skyrocketed in hospitals quickly became overcrowded.
They went from clean and orderly and calm to unsanitary. Understaffed,
and chaotic waves of immigration to the United States meant
that sometimes patients didn't speak the same language as the
doctors of the staff. Staff turnover tended to be very high,
(06:29):
and hospitals were often run by boards of trustees who
might be more focused on politics than on care. Some
of these boards also had a reputation for being corrupt,
and even though the medical field was beginning to think
of mental illness as a treatable illness rather than a
personal moral failing, there was still a lot of stigma
and a perception that it was up to patients to
(06:50):
get better. If a patient wasn't improving, doctors and staff
often concluded that they weren't trying, or that they were
willfully refusing to get better. So it was common for
patients to be cared for by undertrained, frustrated staff who
thought that these people in their care were simply being obstinate.
Abuse and cruelty continued to be commonplace, even in hospitals
(07:12):
that were theoretically following the moral treatment model. Are also,
of course, a number of medical treatments that were going
on that were super questionable by today's standards. This is
a state of mental health care in the United States.
When Elizabeth Packard was hospitalized, it was improving over what
it had been, but it still had a really long
way to go. We will get to her time in
the hospital after a sponsor break. When Elizabeth Packard was
(07:42):
admitted at the Illinois State Asylum and Hospital for the Insane,
it's superintendent was Dr Andrew McFarland of New Hampshire. He
was at the top of his field. He was part
of the first wave of people to join the Association
of Medical Superintendence of American Institutions for the Same or
the a M s a i I, which was a
(08:03):
precursor to the American Psychiatric Association. In eighteen sixty he
was its president. He had tried to hand in his resignation,
citing a serious illness in the family, and when he
tried to do that, the association had declined Elizabeth's admission.
Note read quote June eighteen sixty Elizabeth P. Packard, Kankakee County, married,
(08:24):
aged forty four, native of Massachusetts in this state three
years slightly insane for two years. Was in Wooster Hospital
twenty five years ago. Present attack more decided the past
four months. Supposed cause is excessive application of body and mind.
Reverend Theophilist Packard McFarland's diagnosis was moral insanity with monomania.
(08:48):
Moral insanity was an accepted diagnosis through most of the
nineteenth century. In eighteen thirty five, R. J. C. Pritcher
described it this way quote, there is a form of
mental derangement in which the intellectual facult tease are uninjured,
while the disorder is manifested principally or alone in the
state of feelings, temper, or habits. The moral principles of
(09:08):
the mind are depraved or perverted, the power of self
government is lost or greatly impaired, and the individual is
incapable of conducting himself with decency and propriety in the
business of life. Monomania was another nineteenth century diagnosis, and
as its name suggests, it was a mania connected to
one specific thing, and in Elizabeth's case, that was religion.
(09:31):
Dr McFarland seems to have genuinely believed that Elizabeth was
mentally ill and that his diagnosis was the correct one.
Her husband, too, seems to have genuinely thought that his
wife was, in his word, insane. For her part, Elizabeth
believed these two men were conspiring to imprison her for
her religious views and her refusal to be totally subservient
(09:52):
to her husband. Meanwhile, both her doctor and her husband
believed that these religious views and her lack of subser
armance were evidence of her mental illness. Elizabeth described it
this way, quote in my first struggle after my independence,
I lost my personal liberty sad beginning, had it not
been better for me to submit to oppression and spiritual
(10:14):
bondage rather than have attempted to break the fetters of
marital and religious despotism. No, I cannot feel that I
have done either for myself for others the least wrong
in the course I have thus far taken. Therefore, I
have no recantations to make, and can give no pledge
of further subjection to either of these powers, where their
claims demand the surrender of my conscience to their dictation.
(10:38):
And this is what they call my insanity, and for
which I was sent to the asylum to be cured.
I think it will be a long time before this
cure will be affected. At the start of her hospitalization,
Elizabeth thought that Dr McFarland already believes her to be saying,
or that he would come around that opinion in short order.
It was very obvious to her that she was saying,
(10:59):
and she thought that it would soon be obvious to
him as well. So for about four months she was
in a bright, airy ward with a lot of freedom,
and she felt like she was being treated more like
a guest than like a patient. In those first months
in the hospital, Elizabeth wrote a document praising the doctor
and encouraging him to release her. He ignored it, and
Elizabeth realized that he did not believe that she was sane,
(11:22):
so she started actively advocating for herself and her release.
Her oldest son came to visit her without his father's permission,
but couldn't secure her release because he was not twenty
one years old. Friends tried to get a rid of
habeas corpus, but they were told that because she was married,
that had to come from her husband. After Elizabeth wrote
(11:42):
up a second document, which was scathing in its opinions
of the hospital and its superintendent, she was transferred to
another ward, a much less nice ward which was home
to patients whose illnesses just couldn't be treated with fresh
air and an orderly schedule. She found the conditions they're filthy,
and its staff cruel, and its patients uncared for. When
(12:03):
patients had visitors, she would tell their families about cruelty
she had witnessed in the hospital. She started cleaning the
entire ward herself and organizing the other patients in protesting
their conditions. This included an ongoing campaign to destroy ordinary
hospital property like bed linens and brooms. Elizabeth was eventually
transferred out of this ward and given a private room
(12:26):
to keep her from influencing the other patients, and Elizabeth
met Dorothea Dix. When Dix visited in eighteen sixty one,
Elizabeth called her quote a Christian although honestly and conscientiously
wrong in sustaining our present system of insane asylums. Elizabeth
admired Dix's compassion and her advocacy for the compassionate care
of asylum patients, but thought she was simply wrong in
(12:49):
her belief that there needed to be a robust system
of asylums in the first place. Elizabeth thought most people
who were committed didn't need to be and that working
to build more asylums was Dama Jane. Throughout all of this,
Dr McFarland was updating the Offulist with reports about his
wife's condition. That Elizabeth's religious views were unchanged, that she
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was unrepentant in her refusal to be submissive to her husband,
that she was inspiring restlessness and insubordination among the other patients.
He also told the Offulist that Elizabeth had lost all
of her marital and maternal instinct, even as Elizabeth's own
writing reveals that she was really grieving over the separation
from her children and the strain that all of this
(13:31):
was putting on them. She was especially distressed at the
idea that her daughter Libby was going to have to
bear all the burdens of running this household. During Elizabeth's hospitalization,
Libby was between the ages of ten and twelve years old.
In September of eighteen sixty two, Elizabeth was summoned to
appear before the hospital's board of trustees after months of
(13:53):
petitioning for release. She read a document that denounced Calvinism,
explaining her own beliefs and I she refused to raise
her children according to their father's religious views. Dr McFarland
had screened this document ahead of time, and it began quote, gentlemen,
I am accused of teaching my children doctrines ruinous in
their tendency, and such as alienate them from their father.
(14:16):
I reply that my teachings and practice both are ruinous
to Satan's cause and do alienate my children from Satanic influences.
I teach Christianity, my husband teaches Calvinism. They are antagonistic
systems and uphold antagonistic authorities. Christianity upholds God's authority, Calvinism
(14:36):
the devil's authority. But then she went on to Rita's
second document, one that the doctor had not approved ahead
of time, in which she accused her husband and the
doctor of conspiring against her. Then detailed a range of
injustices and indignities that she had witnessed at the hospital.
Having done all that, Though she asked them not to
release her, divorce was out of the question. From Theophilus's
(14:58):
point of view, Elizabeth did not think that she would
be safe with him. She also realized that her father
and brothers did not have the means to support her,
so she needed to figure out how she might support herself.
She planned to spend the rest of her time in
the hospital writing a book. Her husband and her doctor
had been on the same page about her care until
(15:19):
this point, and this is where they started to diverge.
Dr McFarland pressed the trustees to discharge Elizabeth because of
how much trouble she was causing him. Meanwhile, the awfulist
pressed them to keep her there because he had no
other plan to take care of her. After this meeting,
Dr McFarland told Elizabeth that he would help her get
her book published, probably because he thought doing so would
(15:41):
get her out of his hospital faster. But then she
finished the book and it wasn't something he could support publishing.
It was disjointed and rambley, and a lot of it
was focused on his backstory. He told her he wouldn't
help her after all, and in a desperate effort to
get him to change his mind, Elizabeth wrote him a
love letter, a fusive praising him and essentially calling him
(16:02):
her soul mate. Finally, the hospital trustees gave the awful
is three months notice that they would be discharging his wife.
Dr McFarland said this was because she was incurable and
because of the quote amount of trouble which Mrs Packard
causes us and the disastrous influence which she exerts onto
other patients. Elizabeth was released on June eighth, eighteen sixty three,
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and for a time she stayed with a relative. Then
she went back to Mantino to try to get custody
of her children. In Elizabeth's account, when she got back
to Mantino, her husband kept her locked in the nursery
with the windows nailed shut. In his account, she was
free to come and go regardless, Elizabeth wrote a letter
and slipped it under the window to a passer by.
(16:45):
A friend ultimately got that letter to Judge Charles Starr,
who secured a writ of habeas corpus. Since Elizabeth was
no longer institutionalized but was locked in her home this time,
her husband did not have to be involved. A court
date was set for trial to determine whether she was
saying that. Trial started on January twelfth, eighteen sixty four,
(17:05):
and went on for five days. Unfortunately, we can't read
testimony from it because there's records have been lost. But
people did hear from doctors and friends and family members
and community members, some of whom said Elizabeth was mentally
ill and others of whom did not. In the end,
on January eighteenth, eighteen sixty four, the jury ruled that
she was saying. The awful List said the trial was
(17:27):
a quote reign of mobocracy, insult, partiality, prejudice injustice, and malignity.
On the day of the verdict, he packed up their
minor children and their belongings and went back to Massachusetts.
This left Elizabeth without her children, with nowhere to live
and no way to support herself. She sued for divorce,
but since the awful Ist had already left the state,
(17:50):
the county clerk said he could not be found, and
eventually she just let the matter drop. We'll get to
her life after this, including her years of work to
make sure the same thing couldn't happen to other women.
After a sponsor break, after her husband moved back to
(18:10):
Massachusetts with their youngest children. Elizabeth Packard returned to the
idea she'd had in the hospital, and that was of
supporting herself through writing. She started revising material that she
had started in the hospital. Her first published book was
called Exposure on board the Atlantic and Pacific Car of
Emancipation for the Slaves of Old Columbia engineered by the
(18:30):
Lightning Express or Christianity and Calvinism, compared with an Appeal
to the Government to emancipate the Slaves of the Marriage Union.
That was followed by quote edited by a slave now
imprisoned in Jacksonville Insane Asylum, placed there by her husband
for thinking and all capital letters, written under the inspection
of Dr McFarland, Superintendent of Insane Asylum, Jacksonville. She used
(18:53):
a lot of slavery imagery in her writing. Unsurprisingly it
was like eighteen sixty three. This was the first of
seven books and numerous pamphlets that she wrote over the
next sixteen years, which did turn out to be enough
for her to support herself. Asylum narratives had become a
popular genre. These were sensational first person accounts of people
(19:15):
who had been institutionalized. They were part memoir and part
expos a intended to resonate with fans of the Gothic
fiction that was popular at the time. Elizabeth's goal was
both to support herself and encourage reform to the asylum system.
We should note that also makes it hard to figure out,
like exactly what the truth is to the accounts, because
(19:35):
she was writing them to sell books when very sensational
accounts were pretty typical, and she was also trying to
get people to change the law, and then once again,
very sensational accounts could work toward that end. Also, that
makes a little tricky to figure out, like exactly what
the details were. But that's just some background. She also
(19:56):
got to work lobbying legislators to pass laws to keep
what had happened to her from happening to other women.
She often drafted these bills herself and lobbied lawmakers personally
to get them introduced and past. Some of her bills
were focused on the rights of married women, like the
right for a woman to have full custody of her
children after a divorce, rather than her husband just having
(20:17):
that custody by default. There was also the right for
a married woman to keep all the money she earned
rather than it going to her husband again by default.
Both of these were issues that directly affected her. When
her husband had left with her children, she had no recourse,
and when she started publishing books, she wanted to be
able to keep all the money she earned. She also
(20:37):
worked on bills relating to patient rights. She had observed
that a person accused of a crime was guaranteed rights
to counsel and do process, but in most states, a
person who had a mental illness had none of that
and might be committed without any kind of hearing. This
also meant that people who weren't mentally ill could be
wrongly committed, so she lobbied for bills that required a
(20:58):
trial before a person was committed to an asylum or hospital.
Elizabeth also drafted bills relating to the rights of patients
and mental hospitals. When she was hospitalized, the mail was
often censored or withheld from patients, so she drafted bills
that guaranteed patients free and uncensored access to their mail.
In eighteen sixty five, following her advocacy, Illinois passed a
(21:20):
personal liberty bill requiring a trial for any person being committed,
whether they were married or not, ending the ability for
husbands to have their wives committed without a trial. The
legislature passed this unanimously. A later amendment made this retroactive,
so that people who had been admitted before eighteen sixty
five were still entitled to a trial. Not long after,
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an investigating committee was convened to examine allegations of abuse
at the Illinois Hospital for the Insane, including Elizabeth's accounts.
Elizabeth was called to testify, with questioning going on for
about six hours. At the very end of that day,
that love letter that she had written to Dr McFarland
was introduced as evidence to try to undermine her believability.
(22:04):
Because she had been on the stand for so long,
the commission allowed her to respond to that the next day,
and when she did, she explained what we said earlier,
that it had been a desperate effort to flatter him
and get him to help her publish her book. Ultimately,
the committee found numerous examples of cruelty toward patients at
the hospital, as well as evidence that McFarland had misclassified
patients housing people with minor treatable conditions with patients who
(22:28):
were disruptive and violent. Although the commission recommended that McFarland
be dismissed, the city of Jacksonville and the hospital's board
of trustees stood by him. He eventually resigned on November
eighteen sixty eight, while continuing to have a career in
mental health. Elizabeth kept up her lobbying through all of this,
and through a very bitter, very public three way dispute
(22:50):
among herself, her husband, and her former doctor. Every time
she proposed new legislation, McFarland publicly raised questions about her
mental health. The Offulis was also publicly disparaging of her,
and she of him. This whole situation was unsurprisingly extremely
hard on their children. When the Afulis first had Elizabeth's institutionalized,
(23:12):
the children mostly sided with her. Then, after three years
with their father, they believed that he had been right
about their mother's mental state. Sometime after being reunited with her,
most of them supported her side of the story again,
and this went back and forth repeatedly as they were
with one parent or the other, or had their own
issues going on with their personal lives and their relationships
(23:34):
to the rest of the family. The increasingly acrimonious relationship
between Elizabeth and the Aflis affected them as well. Libby
Packard in particular struggled with her own mental health and
possibly an eating disorder for much of her life, almost
certainly exacerbated by their stressful and chaotic family situation. She
ultimately died in the Illinois Eastern Hospital for the Insane
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in eighteen sixty nine. Elizabeth got a home in Chicago,
where her oldest children already lived. Soon after, she learned
that Massachusetts had passed a law giving mothers equal rights
to custody. She filed a petition to seek custody of
her three youngest children, and the awfulist didn't contest it.
By this point, he really didn't have a good way
to support himself or the children. He could not really
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find a congregation for his very conservative Calvinism anymore, and
in light of Elizabeth's books and varied public testimony and
ongoing advocacy, a lot of people believed that he had
maliciously imprisoned his wife and did not, as a result,
want him to be their preacher. Elizabeth, for her part,
lived a mostly comfortable life in Chicago until the Great
Chicago Fire, spending more time with her children and less
(24:42):
on her bills and advocacy. The fire destroyed her stock
of books and the plates used to print them, which
temporarily left her without a way to earn a living.
She was eventually able to get set up with a
new publisher in New York, but then another fire destroyed
much of her stock there as well. This time she
was insured, though, so she had some money to live
(25:03):
on while she started again. By eighteen seventy two, she
only had one child left at home, and she started
more aggressively taking up these causes, traveling from state to
state advocating for bills to protect patient rights and the
rights of married women. Iowa passed legislation known as Packard's
Law that year. This law established visiting committees, which had
(25:24):
to include at least one woman, to inspect asylums in
that state. These committees were authorized to fire abusive employees.
Their contact information had to be posted in every word
of the hospital, and hospitals were also required to inform
patients of their right to contact the committee about their concerns.
This law also outlawed the censorship or the withholding of
(25:47):
patients mail, and it required a coroner's inquest if a
patient mysteriously died. This bill faced a lot of resistance
from Iowa's hospitals and from the Association of Medical Superintendence
of American Institutions for the Insane. As Elizabeth started campaigning
state by state to try to get similar measures passed elsewhere,
(26:07):
the A M S A I I embarked on what
it called the Project of the Law to try to
block as many of these bills as they could. They
thought these bills made it harder for the hospitals to
subdue patients, and they worried about how their work was
damaging the reputation of the entire field. Yeah, the idea
that the M A M. S AI I thought that
(26:27):
patients needed to be subdued caused Elizabeth Packard a great
amount of outrage. She campaigned through New York and New
England and then on to other parts of the country,
facing character assassination by the A M. S AI and
by her husband everywhere she went. In spite of that,
she tended to be very effective. I mean, she wasn't
(26:47):
always successful. She introduced plenty of bills that didn't ultimately
get passed, but in the words of a Massachusetts legislator quote,
we passed the bill because we could not do otherwise.
For Mrs Packard was so very persistent, we could not
bluff her off. She also went to Washington, d c.
And lobbied President Ulysses S. Grant for a bill to
protect the right of patients in asylums to get their
(27:08):
mail without censorship or surveillance. Although Grant agreed that such
a law was needed, that bill did not ultimately pass.
By the end of Elizabeth Packard's life, more than thirty
bills had been passed to protect the rights of married
women or of psychiatric patients. Some of these came from
her direct advocacy, and others came from the widespread nudes
(27:28):
coverage of her work and her story. In eighteen seventy five,
Mary Todd Lincoln went through a widely publicized insanity trial.
One of the doctors who examined her was Dr McFarland,
and many reports noted that the laws governing her trial
were very strict because of Elizabeth Packard's advocacy. At the
same time, this trial revealed that it was still possible
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for someone to skirt the law to have someone else committed.
Mary Todd Lincoln's son informed her of the upcoming trial
at the last minute, and then appointed an attorney who
was in favor of committing her to represent her. In
eighteen seventy eight, Elizabeth Packard published The Great Drama, which
was four volumes long, that is sixteen hundred pages. It
(28:11):
was written during her last month in the asylum, and
it's very scattered and chaotic. I mean, we talked about
Dr McFarland saying that he couldn't help her get it published.
It was full of references to spiritualism and personal visions
that she had connected to the idea of spiritualism. These
were things that she had distanced herself from an earlier
published writing. It's clear from the text itself that being
(28:35):
in the asylum for three years had taken a mental
and emotional toll on her, But it also seems like
at this point she had established enough of her name
for herself that she didn't think it was gonna hurt
her if she made all of these thoughts public. The
Awful Ist Packard died in eighteen eighty five, and then
Andrew McFarland died in November of eight Elizabeth's writing doesn't
(28:57):
reveal her thoughts or feelings about either of these deaths.
She was, by all appearances, continuing to lobby for bills
to protect women and people with mental illness throughout all
of it. Elizabeth Packard died on July at the age
of eighty after surgery on a strangulated hernia. Her legacy
is a little bit complicated. It's clear that in her
(29:18):
own mind she was mentally well for all of her
adult life. Some of her writing, though, is chaotic and
disordered in a way that it suggests she might have
had some kind of underlying condition, although not necessarily one
that would have required her to be hospitalized against her will.
Or this could have been totally situational, just stemming from
(29:39):
this combination of social expectations and her deteriorating relationship with
her husband, and the hospitalization itself, and just all the
stress that came along with all of that. And there
are also questions about whether the laws she was drafting
really were what was best for patients. It is clear
that before she lived, it was far too easy for
people to have family members committed, especial lee for husbands
(30:01):
to commit their wives. But what's less clear is whether
a requirement for a jury trial is the best way
to protect a person's rights. Many of the laws that
Packard worked on were later revised to protect patient privacy
during these trials, or to require some other assessment process
rather than a trial before being admitted to an impatient facility. Regardless,
(30:22):
though the laws definitely offered more protection than had existed before,
whether it's ultimately true that those were the right protections
or not. Yeah, that's a stressful one because you find
yourself getting raged up about people involved in Yeah. Well,
and it's like when we talked about all the moral
(30:44):
treatment stuff in Part one, Like, I've dealt with anxiety
for a lot of my life, and there have definitely
been times when, like the situation I was in was
exacerbating that, and the idea of being in an airy
ward with lots of fresh air and a predictable routine,
like that's sounds amazing, But I wouldn't have come out
of that experience with the underlying anxiety addressed at all. Yeah, yeah,
(31:10):
uh yeah, I mean it's it's a continually evolving field
as well, like the study of mental health, So who
knows where we'll be in fifty years and if we'll
look back on how we address various things in today's
time looks completely archaic and not sufficient in its own right. Yeah,
totally got some listener mail I do it is from Sophie.
(31:31):
Sophie says Hi, Tracy and Holly. I just finished listening
to your episode about Julia Sand and Chester Arthur, and
it brought up a lot of good memories for me.
I got my undergraduate degree and ended up minoring in
theater arts from the time I spent playwriting and stage managing.
My first experience in the theater department was as an
assistant stage manager for a play about Julia Sand. It
was called Great Emergencies, and it was written by one
(31:54):
of the graduate student playwrights, Sean de Mayor. I'm not
sure how to say that person's name. I'm sorry if
I have banged it. The play incorporated a lot of
Julia's letters into the dialogue, at times staging her as
sitting at the table with President Arthur's advisers to show
the influence her advice had on his decisions. The play
also dramatized Arthur's relationship and ultimate falling out with Roscoe
(32:15):
Conkling in the Stalwarts, and included a hilariously awkward portrayal
of the day Arthur visited Sand's home. Apparently, she was
so caught off guard that her first instinct was to
try to hide behind the curtains. I remember finding it
amusing how similar the political issues of the time were
to us today, extreme partisan politics, racist immigration policies. It's
(32:35):
also impossible to avoid admiring Sand for taking the initiative
and using her voice as a writer and political junkie,
as you put it, to make a difference in the
world when she had no way of knowing that anything
would come of it. The play ended on a rather
sad note, with an imaginary conversation between Sand and Arthur's ghost,
who tells her that he's going to have all of
his papers burned, leaving her with the impression that her
(32:57):
letters will be burned with them, so nobody will ever
know who she was or what she did. I can
only assume that her ghost would be pleased to know
that through this podcast, you were uplifting her and so
many other forgotten voices in history. Hopefully these stories will
inspire others to put their voices to use to even
when it seems the world will not listen. Keep doing
what you're doing best, Sophie Thank you so much Sophie
(33:18):
for this awesome letter. I love hearing about this play
as a former theater kid especially, and I also love
Julius san Still if you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcasts, where a history
podcast at how stuff Works dot com and then we're
all over social media at miss in History. That is
where you will find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.
(33:39):
You can come to our website, which is missed in
History dot com. You can look at where it says
live shows and see our upcoming live shows over this summer.
You can also find a searchable archive of every episode
ever and show notes for the podcast that Holly and
I have worked on. And you can subscribe to our
show on Apple podcasts, that I heart rate you app
(34:00):
and wherever else you find your podcasts. Stuff you Missed
in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio's
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit I heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, the production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
This is part two of our podcast on Packard Versus Packard,
(00:21):
which is when the awfulist Packard had his wife Elizabeth
institutionalized because in his words, she was insane. That was
not her opinion of it at all. Part one we
talked about the early lives of the two of them
and how they had an apparently happy and functional marriage
for about fifteen years that crumbled and became abusive and
(00:44):
then he, as I just said, had her involuntarily committed. Today,
we are going to pick up with Elizabeth's time in
this hospital. First, we're gonna set a little context about
the state of mental health treatment in the nineteenth century.
Some of that's really horrifying. Some of this language, like
we wouldn't necessarily throw around the word insane to describe
(01:06):
a person today. Things like that, uh, super common language
at the time. And um, you can probably understand this
episode without having heard part one. Um, but part one
is really a lot of the detail of how we
got to this point. So before the late eighteenth and
(01:27):
early nineteenth century, people with serious mental health illnesses in
the United States and Europe were generally placed into facilities
commonly called lunatic asylums, and these asylums were not about treatment.
They were essentially prisons. Patients were often put into restraints
and left there with little in the way of comfort
or care, and sometimes they were actively abused by the
(01:50):
staff or others living in the facility, and some of
these asylums were also tourist attractions, with visitors coming to
gawk at the patients, and the United States that started
to shift in the late seventeen hundreds and early eighteen hundreds.
The nation's first private mental hospital was the Asylum for
the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of their Reason,
(02:11):
also known as the Friends Hospital, which was opened by
Quakers in eighteen seventeen. The Friends Hospital focused on the
idea of moral treatment, which became the standard of care
and most mental hospitals by the middle of the nineteenth century.
The basic idea had been put into practice by physician
William Took at an asylum called The Retreat in York, England,
which opened in seventeen ninety six. Over the late seventeen
(02:34):
hundreds and early eighteen hundreds, physicians in Britain and France
continued to refine the retreats methods. Moral treatment focused on
the idea that an asylum should treat its patients humanely,
with the institution acting almost like a stern and paternalistic guardian.
Unlike these earlier lunatic asylums, patients weren't kept in restraints.
(02:55):
They were expected to live in a clean, orderly and
polite way and a strict and disciplined environment. Patients were
expected to do some chores around the building or the
grounds on a regular schedule to give them a sense
of purpose and to keep them on this predictable daily cycle.
Doctors might also prescribe treatments along a more medical model,
(03:15):
including drugs, hydrotherapy, exercise, things like that. In a lot
of ways, this was a big step forward from what
was common in lunatic asylums, but it turned out to
be hard to carry out in practice. Moral treatment was
only helpful for a relatively small number of patients. A
person who was mostly exhausted and stressed and needed time
to recuperate might leave the hospital feeling like their treatment
(03:38):
had cured them. But for many mental illnesses this just
was not the case. A patient with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder,
or depression or any number of other mental illnesses might
be helped to a degree by the predictable daily routine
in a calm and ordered setting, but moral treatment really
didn't address the illness itself. Also, many of the people
(03:59):
who wound up in these hospitals didn't have a mental illness.
The field of psychiatry was really in its infancy without
a clear sense of what was or wasn't a mental illness.
So people with drug and alcohol addictions, developmental disabilities, and epilepsy,
all kinds of other conditions wound up in mental hospitals,
and so did people who just weren't behaving as their
(04:21):
families or society expected them to. There weren't many of
these private hospitals at first. They were mostly in more
affluent areas and available to wealthier people, so most people
with mental illnesses that kept them from being able to
function in society were kept out of sight at home,
or if their families couldn't or wouldn't care for them,
(04:41):
they wound up in alms houses or even prisons. Care
Typically was not good in any of these scenarios. People
caring for family members at home might have good and
loving intentions, but there was so much stigma surrounding mental
illness and ideas that they were brought on by things
like possession, and a lot of different explanations for mental
(05:02):
illnesses that didn't amount to an illness, um that people
caring for family members were just as likely to be
abusive or neglectful. Prisons and alms houses were brutal and
degrading in general, and then on top of that, they
just were not equipped to handle the behaviors that came
along with untreated mental illnesses. This all started to shift
(05:23):
in the eighteen forties and fifties as reformers like Dorothea
Dix advocated for state funded asylums and better care within
those asylums. Most of these newly built asylums followed the
moral care model, and some existing state hospitals began using
it as well. New asylum buildings were typically designed according
to the Kirkbride Plan, developed by Dr Thomas Story Kirkbride.
(05:46):
They were divided into symmetrical wings and wards with lots
of fresh air and natural light. Reformers also advocated for
the idea that people with mental illnesses needed to be
cared for rather than simply locked away. But it turned
out that implementing the moral care model at all these
newly open hospitals could be really difficult. As the public
(06:07):
started to think of mental illness as something that required
treatment at a hospital, admissions skyrocketed in hospitals quickly became overcrowded.
They went from clean and orderly and calm to unsanitary. Understaffed,
and chaotic waves of immigration to the United States meant
that sometimes patients didn't speak the same language as the
doctors of the staff. Staff turnover tended to be very high,
(06:29):
and hospitals were often run by boards of trustees who
might be more focused on politics than on care. Some
of these boards also had a reputation for being corrupt,
and even though the medical field was beginning to think
of mental illness as a treatable illness rather than a
personal moral failing, there was still a lot of stigma
and a perception that it was up to patients to
(06:50):
get better. If a patient wasn't improving, doctors and staff
often concluded that they weren't trying, or that they were
willfully refusing to get better. So it was common for
patients to be cared for by undertrained, frustrated staff who
thought that these people in their care were simply being obstinate.
Abuse and cruelty continued to be commonplace, even in hospitals
(07:12):
that were theoretically following the moral treatment model. Are also,
of course, a number of medical treatments that were going
on that were super questionable by today's standards. This is
a state of mental health care in the United States.
When Elizabeth Packard was hospitalized, it was improving over what
it had been, but it still had a really long
way to go. We will get to her time in
the hospital after a sponsor break. When Elizabeth Packard was
(07:42):
admitted at the Illinois State Asylum and Hospital for the Insane,
it's superintendent was Dr Andrew McFarland of New Hampshire. He
was at the top of his field. He was part
of the first wave of people to join the Association
of Medical Superintendence of American Institutions for the Same or
the a M s a i I, which was a
(08:03):
precursor to the American Psychiatric Association. In eighteen sixty he
was its president. He had tried to hand in his resignation,
citing a serious illness in the family, and when he
tried to do that, the association had declined Elizabeth's admission.
Note read quote June eighteen sixty Elizabeth P. Packard, Kankakee County, married,
(08:24):
aged forty four, native of Massachusetts in this state three
years slightly insane for two years. Was in Wooster Hospital
twenty five years ago. Present attack more decided the past
four months. Supposed cause is excessive application of body and mind.
Reverend Theophilist Packard McFarland's diagnosis was moral insanity with monomania.
(08:48):
Moral insanity was an accepted diagnosis through most of the
nineteenth century. In eighteen thirty five, R. J. C. Pritcher
described it this way quote, there is a form of
mental derangement in which the intellectual facult tease are uninjured,
while the disorder is manifested principally or alone in the
state of feelings, temper, or habits. The moral principles of
(09:08):
the mind are depraved or perverted, the power of self
government is lost or greatly impaired, and the individual is
incapable of conducting himself with decency and propriety in the
business of life. Monomania was another nineteenth century diagnosis, and
as its name suggests, it was a mania connected to
one specific thing, and in Elizabeth's case, that was religion.
(09:31):
Dr McFarland seems to have genuinely believed that Elizabeth was
mentally ill and that his diagnosis was the correct one.
Her husband, too, seems to have genuinely thought that his
wife was, in his word, insane. For her part, Elizabeth
believed these two men were conspiring to imprison her for
her religious views and her refusal to be totally subservient
(09:52):
to her husband. Meanwhile, both her doctor and her husband
believed that these religious views and her lack of subser
armance were evidence of her mental illness. Elizabeth described it
this way, quote in my first struggle after my independence,
I lost my personal liberty sad beginning, had it not
been better for me to submit to oppression and spiritual
(10:14):
bondage rather than have attempted to break the fetters of
marital and religious despotism. No, I cannot feel that I
have done either for myself for others the least wrong
in the course I have thus far taken. Therefore, I
have no recantations to make, and can give no pledge
of further subjection to either of these powers, where their
claims demand the surrender of my conscience to their dictation.
(10:38):
And this is what they call my insanity, and for
which I was sent to the asylum to be cured.
I think it will be a long time before this
cure will be affected. At the start of her hospitalization,
Elizabeth thought that Dr McFarland already believes her to be saying,
or that he would come around that opinion in short order.
It was very obvious to her that she was saying,
(10:59):
and she thought that it would soon be obvious to
him as well. So for about four months she was
in a bright, airy ward with a lot of freedom,
and she felt like she was being treated more like
a guest than like a patient. In those first months
in the hospital, Elizabeth wrote a document praising the doctor
and encouraging him to release her. He ignored it, and
Elizabeth realized that he did not believe that she was sane,
(11:22):
so she started actively advocating for herself and her release.
Her oldest son came to visit her without his father's permission,
but couldn't secure her release because he was not twenty
one years old. Friends tried to get a rid of
habeas corpus, but they were told that because she was married,
that had to come from her husband. After Elizabeth wrote
(11:42):
up a second document, which was scathing in its opinions
of the hospital and its superintendent, she was transferred to
another ward, a much less nice ward which was home
to patients whose illnesses just couldn't be treated with fresh
air and an orderly schedule. She found the conditions they're filthy,
and its staff cruel, and its patients uncared for. When
(12:03):
patients had visitors, she would tell their families about cruelty
she had witnessed in the hospital. She started cleaning the
entire ward herself and organizing the other patients in protesting
their conditions. This included an ongoing campaign to destroy ordinary
hospital property like bed linens and brooms. Elizabeth was eventually
transferred out of this ward and given a private room
(12:26):
to keep her from influencing the other patients, and Elizabeth
met Dorothea Dix. When Dix visited in eighteen sixty one,
Elizabeth called her quote a Christian although honestly and conscientiously
wrong in sustaining our present system of insane asylums. Elizabeth
admired Dix's compassion and her advocacy for the compassionate care
of asylum patients, but thought she was simply wrong in
(12:49):
her belief that there needed to be a robust system
of asylums in the first place. Elizabeth thought most people
who were committed didn't need to be and that working
to build more asylums was Dama Jane. Throughout all of this,
Dr McFarland was updating the Offulist with reports about his
wife's condition. That Elizabeth's religious views were unchanged, that she
(13:09):
was unrepentant in her refusal to be submissive to her husband,
that she was inspiring restlessness and insubordination among the other patients.
He also told the Offulist that Elizabeth had lost all
of her marital and maternal instinct, even as Elizabeth's own
writing reveals that she was really grieving over the separation
from her children and the strain that all of this
(13:31):
was putting on them. She was especially distressed at the
idea that her daughter Libby was going to have to
bear all the burdens of running this household. During Elizabeth's hospitalization,
Libby was between the ages of ten and twelve years old.
In September of eighteen sixty two, Elizabeth was summoned to
appear before the hospital's board of trustees after months of
(13:53):
petitioning for release. She read a document that denounced Calvinism,
explaining her own beliefs and I she refused to raise
her children according to their father's religious views. Dr McFarland
had screened this document ahead of time, and it began quote, gentlemen,
I am accused of teaching my children doctrines ruinous in
their tendency, and such as alienate them from their father.
(14:16):
I reply that my teachings and practice both are ruinous
to Satan's cause and do alienate my children from Satanic influences.
I teach Christianity, my husband teaches Calvinism. They are antagonistic
systems and uphold antagonistic authorities. Christianity upholds God's authority, Calvinism
(14:36):
the devil's authority. But then she went on to Rita's
second document, one that the doctor had not approved ahead
of time, in which she accused her husband and the
doctor of conspiring against her. Then detailed a range of
injustices and indignities that she had witnessed at the hospital.
Having done all that, Though she asked them not to
release her, divorce was out of the question. From Theophilus's
(14:58):
point of view, Elizabeth did not think that she would
be safe with him. She also realized that her father
and brothers did not have the means to support her,
so she needed to figure out how she might support herself.
She planned to spend the rest of her time in
the hospital writing a book. Her husband and her doctor
had been on the same page about her care until
(15:19):
this point, and this is where they started to diverge.
Dr McFarland pressed the trustees to discharge Elizabeth because of
how much trouble she was causing him. Meanwhile, the awfulist
pressed them to keep her there because he had no
other plan to take care of her. After this meeting,
Dr McFarland told Elizabeth that he would help her get
her book published, probably because he thought doing so would
(15:41):
get her out of his hospital faster. But then she
finished the book and it wasn't something he could support publishing.
It was disjointed and rambley, and a lot of it
was focused on his backstory. He told her he wouldn't
help her after all, and in a desperate effort to
get him to change his mind, Elizabeth wrote him a
love letter, a fusive praising him and essentially calling him
(16:02):
her soul mate. Finally, the hospital trustees gave the awful
is three months notice that they would be discharging his wife.
Dr McFarland said this was because she was incurable and
because of the quote amount of trouble which Mrs Packard
causes us and the disastrous influence which she exerts onto
other patients. Elizabeth was released on June eighth, eighteen sixty three,
(16:24):
and for a time she stayed with a relative. Then
she went back to Mantino to try to get custody
of her children. In Elizabeth's account, when she got back
to Mantino, her husband kept her locked in the nursery
with the windows nailed shut. In his account, she was
free to come and go regardless, Elizabeth wrote a letter
and slipped it under the window to a passer by.
(16:45):
A friend ultimately got that letter to Judge Charles Starr,
who secured a writ of habeas corpus. Since Elizabeth was
no longer institutionalized but was locked in her home this time,
her husband did not have to be involved. A court
date was set for trial to determine whether she was
saying that. Trial started on January twelfth, eighteen sixty four,
(17:05):
and went on for five days. Unfortunately, we can't read
testimony from it because there's records have been lost. But
people did hear from doctors and friends and family members
and community members, some of whom said Elizabeth was mentally
ill and others of whom did not. In the end,
on January eighteenth, eighteen sixty four, the jury ruled that
she was saying. The awful List said the trial was
(17:27):
a quote reign of mobocracy, insult, partiality, prejudice injustice, and malignity.
On the day of the verdict, he packed up their
minor children and their belongings and went back to Massachusetts.
This left Elizabeth without her children, with nowhere to live
and no way to support herself. She sued for divorce,
but since the awful Ist had already left the state,
(17:50):
the county clerk said he could not be found, and
eventually she just let the matter drop. We'll get to
her life after this, including her years of work to
make sure the same thing couldn't happen to other women.
After a sponsor break, after her husband moved back to
(18:10):
Massachusetts with their youngest children. Elizabeth Packard returned to the
idea she'd had in the hospital, and that was of
supporting herself through writing. She started revising material that she
had started in the hospital. Her first published book was
called Exposure on board the Atlantic and Pacific Car of
Emancipation for the Slaves of Old Columbia engineered by the
(18:30):
Lightning Express or Christianity and Calvinism, compared with an Appeal
to the Government to emancipate the Slaves of the Marriage Union.
That was followed by quote edited by a slave now
imprisoned in Jacksonville Insane Asylum, placed there by her husband
for thinking and all capital letters, written under the inspection
of Dr McFarland, Superintendent of Insane Asylum, Jacksonville. She used
(18:53):
a lot of slavery imagery in her writing. Unsurprisingly it
was like eighteen sixty three. This was the first of
seven books and numerous pamphlets that she wrote over the
next sixteen years, which did turn out to be enough
for her to support herself. Asylum narratives had become a
popular genre. These were sensational first person accounts of people
(19:15):
who had been institutionalized. They were part memoir and part
expos a intended to resonate with fans of the Gothic
fiction that was popular at the time. Elizabeth's goal was
both to support herself and encourage reform to the asylum system.
We should note that also makes it hard to figure out,
like exactly what the truth is to the accounts, because
(19:35):
she was writing them to sell books when very sensational
accounts were pretty typical, and she was also trying to
get people to change the law, and then once again,
very sensational accounts could work toward that end. Also, that
makes a little tricky to figure out, like exactly what
the details were. But that's just some background. She also
(19:56):
got to work lobbying legislators to pass laws to keep
what had happened to her from happening to other women.
She often drafted these bills herself and lobbied lawmakers personally
to get them introduced and past. Some of her bills
were focused on the rights of married women, like the
right for a woman to have full custody of her
children after a divorce, rather than her husband just having
(20:17):
that custody by default. There was also the right for
a married woman to keep all the money she earned
rather than it going to her husband again by default.
Both of these were issues that directly affected her. When
her husband had left with her children, she had no recourse,
and when she started publishing books, she wanted to be
able to keep all the money she earned. She also
(20:37):
worked on bills relating to patient rights. She had observed
that a person accused of a crime was guaranteed rights
to counsel and do process, but in most states, a
person who had a mental illness had none of that
and might be committed without any kind of hearing. This
also meant that people who weren't mentally ill could be
wrongly committed, so she lobbied for bills that required a
(20:58):
trial before a person was committed to an asylum or hospital.
Elizabeth also drafted bills relating to the rights of patients
and mental hospitals. When she was hospitalized, the mail was
often censored or withheld from patients, so she drafted bills
that guaranteed patients free and uncensored access to their mail.
In eighteen sixty five, following her advocacy, Illinois passed a
(21:20):
personal liberty bill requiring a trial for any person being committed,
whether they were married or not, ending the ability for
husbands to have their wives committed without a trial. The
legislature passed this unanimously. A later amendment made this retroactive,
so that people who had been admitted before eighteen sixty
five were still entitled to a trial. Not long after,
(21:42):
an investigating committee was convened to examine allegations of abuse
at the Illinois Hospital for the Insane, including Elizabeth's accounts.
Elizabeth was called to testify, with questioning going on for
about six hours. At the very end of that day,
that love letter that she had written to Dr McFarland
was introduced as evidence to try to undermine her believability.
(22:04):
Because she had been on the stand for so long,
the commission allowed her to respond to that the next day,
and when she did, she explained what we said earlier,
that it had been a desperate effort to flatter him
and get him to help her publish her book. Ultimately,
the committee found numerous examples of cruelty toward patients at
the hospital, as well as evidence that McFarland had misclassified
patients housing people with minor treatable conditions with patients who
(22:28):
were disruptive and violent. Although the commission recommended that McFarland
be dismissed, the city of Jacksonville and the hospital's board
of trustees stood by him. He eventually resigned on November
eighteen sixty eight, while continuing to have a career in
mental health. Elizabeth kept up her lobbying through all of this,
and through a very bitter, very public three way dispute
(22:50):
among herself, her husband, and her former doctor. Every time
she proposed new legislation, McFarland publicly raised questions about her
mental health. The Offulis was also publicly disparaging of her,
and she of him. This whole situation was unsurprisingly extremely
hard on their children. When the Afulis first had Elizabeth's institutionalized,
(23:12):
the children mostly sided with her. Then, after three years
with their father, they believed that he had been right
about their mother's mental state. Sometime after being reunited with her,
most of them supported her side of the story again,
and this went back and forth repeatedly as they were
with one parent or the other, or had their own
issues going on with their personal lives and their relationships
(23:34):
to the rest of the family. The increasingly acrimonious relationship
between Elizabeth and the Aflis affected them as well. Libby
Packard in particular struggled with her own mental health and
possibly an eating disorder for much of her life, almost
certainly exacerbated by their stressful and chaotic family situation. She
ultimately died in the Illinois Eastern Hospital for the Insane
(23:58):
in eighteen sixty nine. Elizabeth got a home in Chicago,
where her oldest children already lived. Soon after, she learned
that Massachusetts had passed a law giving mothers equal rights
to custody. She filed a petition to seek custody of
her three youngest children, and the awfulist didn't contest it.
By this point, he really didn't have a good way
to support himself or the children. He could not really
(24:20):
find a congregation for his very conservative Calvinism anymore, and
in light of Elizabeth's books and varied public testimony and
ongoing advocacy, a lot of people believed that he had
maliciously imprisoned his wife and did not, as a result,
want him to be their preacher. Elizabeth, for her part,
lived a mostly comfortable life in Chicago until the Great
Chicago Fire, spending more time with her children and less
(24:42):
on her bills and advocacy. The fire destroyed her stock
of books and the plates used to print them, which
temporarily left her without a way to earn a living.
She was eventually able to get set up with a
new publisher in New York, but then another fire destroyed
much of her stock there as well. This time she
was insured, though, so she had some money to live
(25:03):
on while she started again. By eighteen seventy two, she
only had one child left at home, and she started
more aggressively taking up these causes, traveling from state to
state advocating for bills to protect patient rights and the
rights of married women. Iowa passed legislation known as Packard's
Law that year. This law established visiting committees, which had
(25:24):
to include at least one woman, to inspect asylums in
that state. These committees were authorized to fire abusive employees.
Their contact information had to be posted in every word
of the hospital, and hospitals were also required to inform
patients of their right to contact the committee about their concerns.
This law also outlawed the censorship or the withholding of
(25:47):
patients mail, and it required a coroner's inquest if a
patient mysteriously died. This bill faced a lot of resistance
from Iowa's hospitals and from the Association of Medical Superintendence
of American Institutions for the Insane. As Elizabeth started campaigning
state by state to try to get similar measures passed elsewhere,
(26:07):
the A M S A I I embarked on what
it called the Project of the Law to try to
block as many of these bills as they could. They
thought these bills made it harder for the hospitals to
subdue patients, and they worried about how their work was
damaging the reputation of the entire field. Yeah, the idea
that the M A M. S AI I thought that
(26:27):
patients needed to be subdued caused Elizabeth Packard a great
amount of outrage. She campaigned through New York and New
England and then on to other parts of the country,
facing character assassination by the A M. S AI and
by her husband everywhere she went. In spite of that,
she tended to be very effective. I mean, she wasn't
(26:47):
always successful. She introduced plenty of bills that didn't ultimately
get passed, but in the words of a Massachusetts legislator quote,
we passed the bill because we could not do otherwise.
For Mrs Packard was so very persistent, we could not
bluff her off. She also went to Washington, d c.
And lobbied President Ulysses S. Grant for a bill to
protect the right of patients in asylums to get their
(27:08):
mail without censorship or surveillance. Although Grant agreed that such
a law was needed, that bill did not ultimately pass.
By the end of Elizabeth Packard's life, more than thirty
bills had been passed to protect the rights of married
women or of psychiatric patients. Some of these came from
her direct advocacy, and others came from the widespread nudes
(27:28):
coverage of her work and her story. In eighteen seventy five,
Mary Todd Lincoln went through a widely publicized insanity trial.
One of the doctors who examined her was Dr McFarland,
and many reports noted that the laws governing her trial
were very strict because of Elizabeth Packard's advocacy. At the
same time, this trial revealed that it was still possible
(27:51):
for someone to skirt the law to have someone else committed.
Mary Todd Lincoln's son informed her of the upcoming trial
at the last minute, and then appointed an attorney who
was in favor of committing her to represent her. In
eighteen seventy eight, Elizabeth Packard published The Great Drama, which
was four volumes long, that is sixteen hundred pages. It
(28:11):
was written during her last month in the asylum, and
it's very scattered and chaotic. I mean, we talked about
Dr McFarland saying that he couldn't help her get it published.
It was full of references to spiritualism and personal visions
that she had connected to the idea of spiritualism. These
were things that she had distanced herself from an earlier
published writing. It's clear from the text itself that being
(28:35):
in the asylum for three years had taken a mental
and emotional toll on her, But it also seems like
at this point she had established enough of her name
for herself that she didn't think it was gonna hurt
her if she made all of these thoughts public. The
Awful Ist Packard died in eighteen eighty five, and then
Andrew McFarland died in November of eight Elizabeth's writing doesn't
(28:57):
reveal her thoughts or feelings about either of these deaths.
She was, by all appearances, continuing to lobby for bills
to protect women and people with mental illness throughout all
of it. Elizabeth Packard died on July at the age
of eighty after surgery on a strangulated hernia. Her legacy
is a little bit complicated. It's clear that in her
(29:18):
own mind she was mentally well for all of her
adult life. Some of her writing, though, is chaotic and
disordered in a way that it suggests she might have
had some kind of underlying condition, although not necessarily one
that would have required her to be hospitalized against her will.
Or this could have been totally situational, just stemming from
(29:39):
this combination of social expectations and her deteriorating relationship with
her husband, and the hospitalization itself, and just all the
stress that came along with all of that. And there
are also questions about whether the laws she was drafting
really were what was best for patients. It is clear
that before she lived, it was far too easy for
people to have family members committed, especial lee for husbands
(30:01):
to commit their wives. But what's less clear is whether
a requirement for a jury trial is the best way
to protect a person's rights. Many of the laws that
Packard worked on were later revised to protect patient privacy
during these trials, or to require some other assessment process
rather than a trial before being admitted to an impatient facility. Regardless,
(30:22):
though the laws definitely offered more protection than had existed before,
whether it's ultimately true that those were the right protections
or not. Yeah, that's a stressful one because you find
yourself getting raged up about people involved in Yeah. Well,
and it's like when we talked about all the moral
(30:44):
treatment stuff in Part one, Like, I've dealt with anxiety
for a lot of my life, and there have definitely
been times when, like the situation I was in was
exacerbating that, and the idea of being in an airy
ward with lots of fresh air and a predictable routine,
like that's sounds amazing, But I wouldn't have come out
of that experience with the underlying anxiety addressed at all. Yeah, yeah,
(31:10):
uh yeah, I mean it's it's a continually evolving field
as well, like the study of mental health, So who
knows where we'll be in fifty years and if we'll
look back on how we address various things in today's
time looks completely archaic and not sufficient in its own right. Yeah,
totally got some listener mail I do it is from Sophie.
(31:31):
Sophie says Hi, Tracy and Holly. I just finished listening
to your episode about Julia Sand and Chester Arthur, and
it brought up a lot of good memories for me.
I got my undergraduate degree and ended up minoring in
theater arts from the time I spent playwriting and stage managing.
My first experience in the theater department was as an
assistant stage manager for a play about Julia Sand. It
was called Great Emergencies, and it was written by one
(31:54):
of the graduate student playwrights, Sean de Mayor. I'm not
sure how to say that person's name. I'm sorry if
I have banged it. The play incorporated a lot of
Julia's letters into the dialogue, at times staging her as
sitting at the table with President Arthur's advisers to show
the influence her advice had on his decisions. The play
also dramatized Arthur's relationship and ultimate falling out with Roscoe
(32:15):
Conkling in the Stalwarts, and included a hilariously awkward portrayal
of the day Arthur visited Sand's home. Apparently, she was
so caught off guard that her first instinct was to
try to hide behind the curtains. I remember finding it
amusing how similar the political issues of the time were
to us today, extreme partisan politics, racist immigration policies. It's
(32:35):
also impossible to avoid admiring Sand for taking the initiative
and using her voice as a writer and political junkie,
as you put it, to make a difference in the
world when she had no way of knowing that anything
would come of it. The play ended on a rather
sad note, with an imaginary conversation between Sand and Arthur's ghost,
who tells her that he's going to have all of
his papers burned, leaving her with the impression that her
(32:57):
letters will be burned with them, so nobody will ever
know who she was or what she did. I can
only assume that her ghost would be pleased to know
that through this podcast, you were uplifting her and so
many other forgotten voices in history. Hopefully these stories will
inspire others to put their voices to use to even
when it seems the world will not listen. Keep doing
what you're doing best, Sophie Thank you so much Sophie
(33:18):
for this awesome letter. I love hearing about this play
as a former theater kid especially, and I also love
Julius san Still if you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcasts, where a history
podcast at how stuff Works dot com and then we're
all over social media at miss in History. That is
where you will find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.
(33:39):
You can come to our website, which is missed in
History dot com. You can look at where it says
live shows and see our upcoming live shows over this summer.
You can also find a searchable archive of every episode
ever and show notes for the podcast that Holly and
I have worked on. And you can subscribe to our
show on Apple podcasts, that I heart rate you app
(34:00):
and wherever else you find your podcasts. Stuff you Missed
in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio's
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit I heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
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Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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