There are divers sorts of insanity. I had an interview with a doctor, a high officer in the institution, which convinced me, perhaps without reason, that insanity was not limited to the patients and attendants. One day an insane man was struck by an attendant in the solar plexus. He threw his hands up in the air, and cried: "My God, I'm killed." I said to another man in the ward: "There's murder." He said: "How do you know?" I replied: "I have seen death a few times." In an hour, sure enough, the report came that the insane man was dead. A few days later I was talking with the doctor referred to and I said:
"I was an eye-witness of the assault on D----." And I described the affair.
"You have been reported to me repeatedly," he replied.
"By whom?" I asked, "attendants or patients?"
"Surely," I remarked, "you don't believe half what insane men tell you, do you? Doctor, these same patients (in reality sane stool-pigeons) that have been reporting me, have accused you of every crime in the calendar."
"Oh, but," he said, "I am an old man and the father of a family."
"Doctor," I continued, "do you believe that a man can be a respectable physician and still be insane?"
"In California lately," I replied, "A superintendent of an insane asylum has been accused of murder, arson, rape and peculation. This man, too, was more than fifty, had a mother, a wife and children, and belonged to a profession which ought to be more sympathetic with a patient than the church with its communicants. When a man will stoop to such crimes, is it not possible that there is a form of mental disease called partial, periodical paralysis of the faculty humane, and was not Robert Louis Stevenson right when he wrote _Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde_?"
The doctor grabbed me by the wrist and shouted: "Don't you dare to tell anybody about this interview." I looked into his eyes and smiled, for I am positive that at that moment I looked into the eyes of a madman.
King Kelly, an attendant who had been on duty in insane asylums for many years, was very energetic in trying to get information from the stool-pigeons. The patients used to pass notes around among themselves, and the attendants were always eager to get hold of those notes, expecting to find news of beats (escapes) about to be attempted. I knew that King Kelly was eager to discover "beats" and as I, not being a stool-pigeon, was in bad odor with him, I determined to give him a jar. So one day I wrote him the following note: