On March 22, a few hours after Sacco had gone to bed, he complained
of a headache and asked the ward attendant for a wet towel to place
across his forehead. When the attendant left, Sacco sprang out of
bed and struck his head several times against a chair, lacerating
his scalp. Wardmen rushed in and seized him, and as they struggled
he cried out, “I am innocent! There is no justice!” It took four men
to restrain him and put him in a dry pack. Next morning he was again
calm and cooperative, and when the director, Dr. C. MacFie Campbell
arrived, he said with some embarrassment, “I am ashamed of what I
done.” He told the director that he was tired of life and wished to
kill himself. Dr. Campbell considered the incident “a transitory
condition of emotional tension which was intelligible in view of the
emotional strain to which the patient has been subject.” There was
no recurrence of any such episode or of the Dedham delusions. At the
end of the observation period Dr. Campbell wrote to Judge Thayer
that with the exception of that one night Sacco’s “behavior has been
that of the ordinary hospital patient. There has been no difficulty
in caring for him ... his mood has, on the whole, been equable.”
He concluded: “The result of the observation of the patient in the
Boston Psychopathic Hospital has been that we have found no evidence
of insanity of any type.”
Nevertheless, Thayer extended Sacco’s observation period for another
month, and the early days of April presented quite a different
picture. Mrs. Evans, visiting Sacco on April 2, was much disturbed
by his mental state. She told the doctor in charge “that she knew
nothing about medicine but that in her opinion [the] patient was
talking like a crazy man.”
_She said_ [the hospital report continued] _that the patient insisted
he would kill himself.... He said that he had suffered long enough,
that he wanted it over with one way or another, that when he went
back to jail he would give the judge twenty-four hours to decide the
case and that if he did not set him free patient would “take things
in my own hands.”_
Five days later when Rosina was visiting, Sacco told her that he was
going crazy. After she left, according to the report, he
_suddenly jumped out of his bed and rushed toward the edge of the
open door, with his head lowered in a blind, impulsive manner....
Thereafter, he became excited, somewhat noisy, and struck out
violently, requiring considerable restraint. He was given treatment
in the form of a dry pack with cold compresses to his head. He was
talking and shouting in an excited tone, maintaining that his wife
was confined in the ward above him, whence he had been hearing (as a
matter of fact), the voices and cries of the women patients, which he
believed were those of his wife._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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