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-
Firstly.--If my brothers and sisters desired my good by placing me in
the Insane Assylum, and the Doctors have taken the advantage of my
weakness and my brother's ignorance of my true state at that time,
and it has proved to be my everlasting ruin, by the Doctors giving me
that medicine which racked and tortured me and destroyed my phisical
health and ease of body and mental happiness. Their motive can be
determined by their treatment and attention while there, and the manner
of the treatment that I have received in hearing of my sufferings.
For good motives always lead to good and kind actions. I have given
in general a detail of the steps that were taken with me from the
time of my leaving my labour on Saturday, before I was carried to the
Hospital, on the Thursday following, and after I was there, their
attention to me. I appeal to the public mind if this was good, kind
and just treatment; if it was only my earthly happiness destroyed I
should rejoice amidst it all. I was taken out by my brother William,
from New York; but now I have no society, I cannot resort to God and
to God's people for comfort, and take happiness in the service of God,
for I have not happiness within myself, as it is the spirit of Christ
that makes us happy, and enables us to look forward to never ending
eternity of bliss. Now that spirit is taken from me by medicine, and
it leaves my body in distress, from the crown of my head to the sole
of my foot, without carnal love of this world, or the love of God. Of
course without the spirit of Christ we cannot love God. I am thrown out
upon the world without any thing to help myself with. My money that I
labored hard for, late and early, confined to a factory life, is taken
by my brothers. They are not willing to give me my own, or to help me.
I am unable to work, my body is in such distress; and I have no spirit
to support me under any thing, and am dependant upon the kindness of
friends who have been deceived about me, by the false report that I
was deranged, while all the time I was suffering the greatest cruelty
that could be practised upon an immortal being. They feel distress for
me, although it is a crime they never heard of before, and many of
them wonder that I have a particle of reason left, and do not wonder
at my altered looks and language, and feel that such a crime should be
exposed to the world. It is not the popular clergy that will be seized
upon and carried into that house and have this medicine forced down
them, but the poor honest hearted christian that is despised and cast
out, and trodden under foot like the despised Nazarine. This havoc
among the saints of God, by infidels, has been going on for years,
undoubtedly, and when they have told of it on getting out of their
power, it has been looked upon as derangement, and their account being
sealed with God, they have not undertaken to publish it; but I will,
whether it is or not; and if my brothers wilfully hired those Doctors
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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