I have already described how an assistant physician arbitrarily denied my request that I be permitted to send a birthday letter to my father, thereby not merely exceeding his authority and ignoring decency, but, consciously or unconsciously, stifling a sane impulse.  That this should occur while I was confined in the Bull Pen was, perhaps, not so surprising.  But about four months later, while I was in one of the best wards, a similar, though less open, interference occurred.  At this time I was so nearly normal that my discharge was a question of but a very few months.  Anticipating my return to my old world, I decided to renew former relationships.  Accordingly, my brother, at my suggestion, informed certain friends that I should be pleased to receive letters from them.  They soon wrote.  In the meantime the doctor had been instructed to deliver to me any and all letters that might arrive.  He did so for a time, and that without censoring.  As was to be expected, after nearly three almost letterless years, I found rare delight in replying to my reawakened correspondents.  Yet some of these letters, written for the deliberate purpose of re-establishing myself in the sane world, were destroyed by the doctor in authority.  At the time, not one word did he say to me about the matter.  I had handed him for mailing certain letters, unsealed.  He did not mail them, nor did he forward them to my conservator as he should have done, and had earlier agreed to do with all letters which he could not see his way clear to approve.  It was fully a month before I learned that my friends had not received my replies to their letters.  Then I accused the doctor of destroying them, and he, with belated frankness, admitted that he had done so.  He offered no better excuse than the mere statement that he did not approve of the sentiments I had expressed.  Another flagrant instance was that of a letter addressed to me in reply to one of those which I had posted surreptitiously.  The person to whom I wrote, a friend of years’ standing, later informed me that he had sent the reply.  I never received it.  Neither did my conservator.  Were it not that I feel absolutely sure that the letter in question was received at the hospital and destroyed, I should not now raise this point.  But such a point, if raised at all, must of course be made without that direct proof which can come only from the man guilty of an act which in the sane world is regarded as odious and criminal.

I therefore need not dilate on the reasons which made it necessary for me to smuggle, as it were, to the Governor of the State, a letter of complaint and instruction.  This letter was written shortly after my transfer from the violent ward.  The abuses of that ward were still fresh in my mind, and the memory of distressing scenes was kept vivid by reports reaching me from friends who were still confined there.  These private sleuths of mine I talked with at the evening entertainments or at other gatherings.  From them I learned that brutality had become more rife, if anything, since I had left the ward.  Realizing that my crusade against the physical abuse of patients thus far had proved of no avail, I determined to go over the heads of the doctors and appeal to the ex-officio head of the institution, the Governor of the State.