Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 April 1891 — SISTER SUSAN IS GREEDY [ARTICLE]

SISTER SUSAN IS GREEDY

ANNA DICKINSON’S INSANITY A CANARD. Her Sister Thought to Prey Upon the Public's Sympathy—So Says Anna Herself, and she la Corroborated by an Eminent Physician. \ Anna Dickinson in a public mad-house —that was bad enough. K, But Anna Dickinson in a public madhouse and perfectly sane—Anna Dickinson, gifted and eloquent, noted and honored figure of her time, famous for her labors in behalf of the enslaved and her championship her own sex—Anna Dickinson shut up with maniacs and gibbering lunatics, and still in the possession of her own reason —that is infinitely revolting to a country that still respects her. Shocking as it is, that, is her story. Worse than that, it is her story that the wrongs and sufferings she has undergone are the Jesuit of a sister s designs. Released from imprisonment by chance, Miss Dickinson, who is now in New York, has chosen to give her extraordinary narrative to the world for the first time. In moderate language, with the bearing of a woman who had weighed every word and understood the significance of all she said, she told what she had gone through and why she believed she had been the victim of a conspiracy. Feb. 25—so ran the substance of her story—she had been seized in har home at West Pittston, Pa., carried off by force, and in violation of law confined in the State Asylum at Danville. There she had staid five weeks and a day, without examination as to her mental or physical condition, sick, worn with terror and anxiety, needing medical attendance and lacking it, knowing all the »time that a terrible wrong was being practiced upon her, but deprived of communication with her friends and the world. From this situation she was taken on April 2 in a sad state of destitution and misery by a physician from another State, who- had been called upon to remove her to his supposed private asylum. Instead of shutting her up in another institution, this physician, a practitioner of repute and standing, had recognized her sane condition and set her free. To account for her incarceration stories had been set afloat of her violence and desperate madness. These Miss Dickinson circumstantially declared to be utterly false. The object of subjecting her to these dreadful ordeals was, as she believed, to get money from the public by arousing sympathy for her pretended condition. The person whom she accused as the chief instrument in this unnatural design is her own sister. Legal proceedings which will test the justice of these sweeping charges are to be begun at once. Miss Dickinson went to New York with Dr. Frederick W. Seward of Goshen, N. Y., at whose house she has been since she escaped from Danville April 2. “It is unfortunate,” said Miss Dickinson, “that I must begin my defense against the charge of Insanity by making a charge of insanity against somebody else. Disagreeable as it is for mp to reveal to the public in this way the misfortunes of our family, I am obliged to say that for many years my sister Susan has been a monomaniac on the subject of money. “Looking back over the last few years and putting together many things which seemed to me then to be strange, but not suspicious, I think I see very plainly that she has been influenced by two motives. She had first the intense and grasping desire for money, and a belief that if she had it she could handle it better than I could. She had, second, an intense hatred and jealousy for me. “With the few people who live in Pittston I had scarcely the slightest acquaintance, and absolutely no friendship. My sister knew everybody, and everybody knew her. In this way she was able to circulate reports about me and my condition, which the villagers, not having any knowledge of the subject, even the slightest, were bound to believe. “One day while at work I wa« seized and hustled off to the asylum at Danville without being allowed to communicate with anybody. I tried to send out various dispatches to my relatives and friends telling of the outrage to which I had been subjected. But the next day passed and the next, and I heard nothing. Then I began to realize that I had been cut off deliberately from any communication with the world. “The Danville Asylum is a horrible place. My tortures in it were more than 1 can describe. All my associates were maniacs, nevertheless. There seemed to be a regular system of annoyances adopted toward them. AH the daily newspapers in which accounts of my supposed madness and false representations of my violence werWcon’spiduously printed were placed where I could not help seeing them. Attendants and halfwitted patients nagged, followed, pestered, and teased me. “I needed the services of a physician. But from first to last, from the moment I entered that horrible den to the day I escaped from it, no examination was made of my condition, no physician inquired as to whether I needed any help, no medicines were provided for ,jm,e, no attention whatever was paid to me,” Dr. Seward, whose name is a familiar and irreproachable one in medical science, said: “Miss Anna Dickinson is perfectly sane. I have studied her case attentively, and know there is nothing the matter with her. I investigated some of her statements, and found them to be true. ”