A Sketch of the Life of Elizabeth T. Stone and of Her Persecutions: With an Appendix of Her Treatment and Sufferings While in the Charlestown McLean Assylum, Where She Was Confined Under the Pretence of InsanityStone, Elizabeth T.
Religion
A Sketch of the Life of Elizabeth T. Stone and of Her Persecutions: With an Appendix of Her Treatment and Sufferings While in the Charlestown McLean Assylum, Where She Was Confined Under the Pretence of Insanity
Stone, Elizabeth T.
McLean Hospital; Mental illness -- Personal narratives; Stone, Elizabeth T., 1811-
tea, or something to calm me; he said that I must not think I was so
filled with the spirit; any minister would laugh at me. I repeated some
passages of the Scriptures to him; one was that St. Paul says, "Be ye
filled with the fullness of God." He said it was because St. Paul saw
the Lord Jesus. I told him that made no difference, all had got to
go the same way to heaven; that I stood upon the Gospel, but I never
disputed about religion. He said he would give me something to calm
and strengthen me; but nothing was brought me until night, nor did my
brother come to see me. After I had retired, Mary Brigham came into my
room and said she had got some medicine for me. _I_ rose up and took
it, thinking it was something to do me good. It was a pill and a little
mug of mixture, and Mary Brigham went out and locked the door; but O,
alas how little did I know where I was and what I was put into that
house for. Such a crime I never read of, and it is covered up under
the garb of derangement, and I am the poor sufferer. As soon as I took
it I was thrown into most violent pain and distress, beyond the power
of language to describe, neither can I give any one an adequate idea.
The medicine effected my brain, the back part of my head, hardened or
petrified it, and the brain is the seat of the nerves, and any one can
conceive of the distress that I must be thrown into all over in my
body, every nerve in me drawing and straining convulsively. Sometimes I
was almost drawn back double and then forward, rolling in the bed from
one side to the other in the greatest agony. When my door was unlocked
in the morning I rose. I had wept bitterly all night. The thoughts
of my situation, and for so strange a thing as it may appear, that
medicine can be given to destroy the work of Grace in a person, even so
it can be done, and Dr. Bell and Dr. Fox both possess that knowledge of
giving medicine to accomplish this awful outrage upon Christianity; and
it is done under the garb of derangement, and they are screened from
public censure, and it is a greater crime than that they had tortured
me to death any way that I ever read of. As I come out of my room a
young lady asked me what made me weep; so I took her hand and asked
her to tell me where I was, and what kind of people I was with. She
asked me if I did not know, and I told her no. She then told me that
I was in the Insane Assylum. I then knew that I was betrayed into the
hands of the wicked to be destroyed. I told her that the medicine that
they had given me was killing the spirit of Christ in me; and that I
was lost. I began to lose all idea of holiness. But I knew it would be
covered up under the garb of derangement, and then I recollected what
my brother Stephen's wife said, "that God had nothing more for me to
do." Of course, if any one has not the spirit of Christ, they cannot
serve God. It is not only a belief, but they must have the spirit.
Dr. Fox came in about 10 o'clock; while I was laying on the bed he
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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