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Sometimes the bathwater was hot, so it scalded. Sometimes the water was poured in a pail above their heads. Sometimes the patients were placed in the bath with “their hands and feet tied, and if they resisted, a straitjacket was placed upon them.”12 The attendants would then hold their heads beneath the water “as long as it was safe to leave them.” They’d be lifted out only to “cast the water from their stomach,” then the same process would continue “as long as the patient was thought able to bear it.” This punishment was administered when the women disobeyed attendants’ orders to stop talking, when patients modestly wished to bathe alone, and when patients spoke back. Even the attendants themselves conceded they used it “for a slight offense,” such as “silly behaviour and laughing.”13 Elizabeth had tried appealing to McFarland about this torture. He seemed all too conscious of it, later writing of the “convenience”14 of the bathtub as “an engine of petty tyranny.” “How many scores is it made to pay off; how many sly grudges to satisfy?” he asked rhetorically, describing it as “a Damocles’ sword, always suspended” above his patients’ heads. Yet he defended his staff, saying the use of physical force was “but to confess to the fallibility of human nature.”15
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