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-
to give me that medicine, to take from me my eternal life, because I
differed from them in my religion, may God bring it to light, and the
guilty not go unpunished. Females are engaged in this horrid crime, and
do know that it can be done. Relief Barber, Mary Brigham and Esther
Benton, who are engaged in the service of that house, and my brother's
wife, were knowing to it before I was carried there. Brothers Eben,
Stephen, and James, are the ones that were concerned about my being
carried there, and they are the ones that had ought to investigate my
suffering. But, instead of that, they have not interested themselves
in my sufferings or wants, and brother Stephen and his wife came to
brother Eben's, where I was, and did not even send a request to my room
to see me. I speak of this to show that my brothers do not feel for
me as brothers should feel for a sister. So far as the natural heart
is concerned, had my brothers regarded my character and my feelings,
and the feelings of our aged parents, they would not have put me into
an Insane Hospital without something being done for me first. I might
mention about my clothes that I had sent me.--I was taken and shut up
from them, and from the means to obtain things to make me comfortable,
or hardly decent; but if my brothers and sisters thought my health was
poor, and they desired my good, kind actions would have followed kind
feelings. I have before remarked, would they not have sent me little
nourishments, such as they do not have there, as friends generally do
when they have a friend that is out of health. But I received nothing
to remind me that I was not forgotten by them. Kind reader, have you a
wife, sister, or an unprotected daughter in this wide world, (however
you may be situated, the same laws govern nature thro'ought the world,)
would you see her deceived into a hospital the third day of leaving
her work, having nothing done for her first, and then not permit her
to see one of her kind friends? Because God saw fit not to give me the
abundance of this world was I any the less incapable of happiness here
and hereafter? Because I was a poor factory girl must I be treated in
this brutal manner, in this boasted land of liberty? I always had done
for myself, and was happy. I envied not the Queen upon her throne. I
sought enjoyment in expanding my immortal mind in knowledge, looking
through nature up to nature's God, and cultivating the love of God
richly in my heart. I was kept in the Assylum sixteen long and weary
months. My brothers say they come to the house; but they might as well
have stayed away as to come, for all the good it did me, for I never
saw them. They say Dr. Bell would not let them see me. What right had
they to put me in such a place? The very face of it shows that there
was some cruelty being practised upon me, that Dr. Bell did not want
any one to know out of that house. It may be said that I had no home,
and the woman that I boarded with would not have me in her house.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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