I had quit the dining room six months before this, except to eat my meals, as the Supervisor had told me I need not work there longer unless I pleased; so I quit it, and took to sweeping the hall for exercise every morning after breakfast. There were a number of men on the hall who were excessive eaters, but not one chore could be got out of them, except to make their beds and sweep their rooms.
The floor of the hall had to be scrubbed and washed every Monday morning; this gave us a little good exercise. The cleaning of house came on this spring, as usual; this is quite a business; the patients can have employment in this for a number of days. While this is going on no visitors are received. The windows are all taken out and washed, the mouldings and casings all scoured, the bedsteads all taken out of their rooms, the beds put into a pile and the bedsteads scoured and thoroughly saturated with kerosene, to prevent the vandals from eating up the patients. All the rooms are then whitewashed.
The bedsteads are prepared with strips of sheet-iron instead of cords to lay the beds on; this, perhaps, is an improvement.
One particular incident I cannot pass over without recording. Some time in the course of the fall or winter of 1864-5—I cannot be particular here as to the exact time—Dr. Gray came on the hall accompanied by a man in regimentals; a dark, curly black-haired man, rather slim, but carrying a decided look and apparently a firm will, and, as I inspected him from a distance, he looked to me, as though he could hew a man in pieces with all the sang froid of a Roman gladiator.
The doctor introduced him as Dr. Shantz, a surgeon from the army, and from this time was to be the attending physician on this side of the house. I had dreaded the one we had before, but now I thought we had got a Rehoboam, who declared “his little finger should be thicker than his father's loins; that whereas his father had chastised them with whips, he would chastise them with scorpions.”
Such were the views I had of Dr. Shantz when I first saw him. He commenced his rounds of visitation, but I shunned him as far as I was able to do so, till some observed it, and thought I treated the doctor with great coldness. I was afraid of him.
At length we came in contact. I found he had a good mind, penetrating and scientific; I found he loved books, and was a good observer of nature, and withal was not an infidel; my fears fled. I soon found that he could not only reason, but was willing to hear others. After I had thoroughly weighed him in my own mind, I resolved on an experiment. For more than a year and a half I had now taken medicine three times a day, and was now, besides this, drinking strong beer before every meal, as to the medicine I had no doubt but it injured me, and I felt that I was like a candle burning at both ends, the pressure of the asylum on the one hand and the medicine on the other.
And so I contrived to evade taking it, by spitting it out. I confess I did this for more than three months, and I knew I felt the better for it. I will not stop now to argue the question of the right or wrong of my course, as I was not treated as a moral agent. I simply state facts as they were.
I told the doctor I would like to have an interview with him in my room if he would admit it. He said he would do so, and not long after this he came to my room and gave me a fair opportunity to tell him all that was in my heart.
I gave him a brief history of my coming into the asylum, the causes that led to it as far as I knew, what my feelings and state were before, and at the time I came there; how matters had gone on with me since I had been there; what my appetite was, my general state of health, and how I felt at that time; and closed by telling him that it appeared strange to me, that the manner of doctoring here should be different from the manner out of the institution.