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She sent for the Doctor.

He came, and told her she must not have any supper, and must do as the attendants requested.

Still she told them she would not go until she pleased to do so.

Then they pushed her into her room and stripped off her clothing and tore it into ribbons before they left her.

They pinched and pounded her until her arms were covered with black and blue spots and also her entire body above her waist. They kept her in a straight-jacket part of the time and told her if she made any complaint they should send her down to the "lodge."

Her food was not only very scanty, but so poor that it was more suitable food for dogs and cats than human beings; and if they refused to eat this it was forced down their throats with the fingers of the attendants.

She had seen a feeble patient, while in a straight-jacket, pulled from her bed by the hair of her head, and then dragged to the shower-bath and there held under it so long as they chose. And this was done to torture her, and not for hydropathic treatment. And such cases were not of rare occurrence but daily practiced there.

Her clothes were all taken from her and have never been returned.

She often tried to get away, and often begged of the Doctor to send her off, but he would not.

She showed her black and blue arms to the commissioners when they passed through, and one remarked as he beheld them:

"'Tis shameful!"

There was always extra scrubbing and cleaning about the house and premises, whenever the commissioners were expected. At other times neglect and disorder sometimes prevailed to a reprehensible degree.

The patients, the boarders of the house, were required to do all their own chamber-work, and most of the ward work, and the Irish servant girls would sit and sew while they compelled the patients to do the work for which they, as attendants, were paid for doing. Whether sick or well, she adds:

"We were required to make our own beds, empty our slops and clean our own rooms, and when I made complaint to the Doctor of this injustice, telling him I was not able to do this work, the only reply he made was:

"It is good exercise for you!"

"We were sometimes allowed to walk out, but within very circumscribed limits, and never without the watch and scrutiny of these contemptible and often very insolent attendants. In fact, I often refused to go at all, to avoid the petty persecutions and contemptible authority they loved to exercise over us.

"In all their treatment of the patients they endeavored to impress the feeling upon the mind of every boarder:

"'You are merely our under-servants, subject wholly to our rule and dictation, as your keepers, while you are our prisoners.'

"In fact, the patients in Bloomingdale Asylum are treated more like brutes than human beings.

"I did not often make complaints to the Doctors of our attendants' ill-treatment of the patients, because I found the remark the Doctor once made to me, in reply to my report of mistreatment, to be too true, viz.:

"'Mrs. ---, we must take the statements of our attendants to be true rather than the counter-statements of the patients.'

"And it was the habitual practice of the attendants to deny the charges brought against them by the patients, no matter how abundant and consistent the testimony in support of these charges; and besides, the attendants would threaten us with the straight-jacket and a consignment to the "lodge" if we did report them to the Doctor.

"Bad as it was, the treatment I received would have been much more cruel, had my friends failed to visit the asylum as often as they did.

"This manifested solicitude on their part was a great restraint upon them, for my friends would not be put off with their excuses, but would insist upon seeing me when they came.

"I wrote many letters which I gave to my attendants to mail for me, but not a single one of the whole number thus entrusted ever reached the friend to whom it was directed.

"I am very sure that had my imprisonment been continued two months longer, I should have become a raving maniac.

"But at the expiration of my term of three months, my friends insisted upon taking me out, and thus I was saved from this impending fate, which has already befallen many an inmate now confined in Bloomingdale Asylum."

At the request of the Commissioners and the witness herself I withhold her name. She is a married woman and a resident of New York city, of good and respectable standing.

Testimony of a Gentleman's Experience of Life in Bloomingdale Asylum.

The following statement was given to the public, August 8, 1872, through the columns of the New York Tribune:

"One gentleman, for twenty years a prosperous merchant of this city, had an opportunity, not long ago, of giving a few months study to the internal workings of the Asylum at Bloomingdale.

"The question of his sanity had never been raised, to his knowledge, until in the course of conversation he betrayed a knowledge of some painful domestic matters in the family of a relative.