Pioneer for Patients’ Rights

While Dorothea Dix was pleading with state legislators in the mid-19th century to establish asylums for the mentally ill, Elizabeth Packard was engaged in a nationwide campaign to protect to the inmates of those asylums.

Mrs. Packard, the wife of a Presbyterian clergyman in Monteno, Ill., and mother of six children, was summarily committed in 1860 to the asylum in Jacksonville, Ill. At that time, Illinois law stated that “married women with infants who in judgment of the medical superintendents of the state asylums are evidently insane or distracted may be detained at the request of the husband or guardian without the evidence of insanity required in other cases.”

Mrs. Packard remained in the asylum for three years. She claimed her husband put her there because her liberal theological views differed from his Calvinist theology. She finally obtained a hearing before the asylum trustees, who ordered the asylum superintendent to return her to her husband. He subsequently locked her up in their home.

Learning that her husband was planning to have her committed to the Northhampton asylum in her native Massachusetts, Mrs. Packard smuggled a note to a friend who obtained a writ of habeus corpus from a local judge, and a jury trial over the issue followed. She was declared sane and then moved to her father’s house in Massachusetts, where she began a campaign against what she termed excesses of the asylums.

She published three books, which had extensive circulation and sales. (Copies of the books are in the APA Library Rare Books Room.)

The title page of the first book, published in 1866, reads: “Marital Power Exemplified in Mrs. Packard’s Trial and Self Deferral from the Charge of Insanity or Three Years Imprisonment for Religious Belief by the Arbitrary Will of a Husband with an Appeal to the Government to Change the Laws as to Afford Protection to Married Women.”

The second book, which was published in 1868, was titled The Prisoner’s Hidden Life or Insane Asylums Unveiled as Demonstrated by the Investigating Committee of the Legislature of Illinois Together with Mrs. Packard Coadjutor’s Testimony.

The third book, which came out in 1869, Modern Persecution or Insane Asylums Unveiled, recounted the experiences of patients whom Mrs. Packard met while she was in the asylum.

Having succeeded in arousing considerable public interest, Mrs. Packard fought for laws that would protect women’s rights regarding commitment, and she also championed a personal liberty bill, which the Illinois legislature passed in 1869. That law required a jury trial for before a person could be committed to an asylum, and it remained in effect for 25 years. Iowa enacted a similar law in 1872, and the Massachusetts legislature also took similar steps to safeguard the rights of patients.

Mrs. Packard’s campaign helped to mobilize sufficient public interest and support so that in 1880, a group of influential citizens and social reformers organized the National Society for the Protection of the Insane and the Prevention of Insanity. The society disbanded in 1886. Albert Deutsch, in his book The Mentally Ill in America, cites the unremitting antagonism of the National Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane (forerunner of the American Psychiatric Association) as helping bring about the demise of the organization.

A long, unsigned editorial in the October 1869 issue of the American Journal of Insanity (now the American Journal of Psychiatry), presumably written by the editor, Dr. John Gray, superintendent of the Utica (N.Y.) State Hospital, begins, “For the last two or three years, the state of Illinois has been singularly under the influence of a handsome and talkative crazy woman and of a Legislature prompted by her to be crazy on at least one point,” and “an attractive person and a double-springed tongue gave force and persuasion to the direful romance of this fascinating woman, and she was successful enough, by her feminine arts, to bewitch a whole legislature.”

Dr. Gray portrayed Mrs. Packard as a crazy but fascinating (sexy?) woman, but perhaps she was an early feminist seeking the rights of women in a male-dominated society. Whichever was the case, she was quite successful. ▪