The evils of the straitjacket? 

No incidents of my life have ever impressed themselves more indelibly on my memory than those of my first night in a straitjacket. Within one hour of the time I was placed in it I was suffering pain as intense as any I ever endured, and before the night had passed it had become almost unbearable. My right hand was so held that the tip of one of my fingers was all but cut by the nail of another, and soon knifelike pains began to shoot through my right arm as far as the shoulder, After four or five hours the excess of pain rendered me partially insensitive to it. But for fifteen consecutive hours I remained in that instrument of torture, and not until the twelfth hour, about breakfast time the next morning, did an attendant so much as loosen a cord. During the first seven or eight hours, excruciating pains racked not only my arms, but half of my body. Though I cried and moaned, in fact, screamed so loudly that the attendants must have heard me, little attention was paid to me - possibly because of orders from Mr Hyde after he had again assumed the role of Doctor Jekyll, I even begged the attendants to loosen the jacket enough to ease me a little, This they refused to do, and they even seemed to enjoy being in a position to add their considerable mite to my torture, Before midnight I really believed that I should be unable to endure the torture and retain my reason. A peculiar pricking sensation which I now felt in my brain, a sensation exactly like that of June, 1900, led me to believe that I might again be thrown out of touch with the world I had so lately regained. Realising the awfulness of that fact, I redoubled my efforts to effect my rescue. Shortly after midnight I did succeed in gaining the attention of the night watch, Upon entering my room he found me flat on the floor. I had fallen from the bed and perforce remained absolutely helpless where I lay, I could not so much as lift my head. This, however, was not the fault of the straitjacket. It was because I could not control the muscles of my neck, which that day had, been so mauled. I could scarcely swallow the water the night watch was good enough to give me, He was not a bad sort; yet even he refused to let out the cords of the straitjacket, As he seemed sympathetic, I can attribute his refusal to nothing but strict orders issued by the doctor. It will be recalled that I placed a piece of glass in my mouth before the straitjacket was adjusted. At midnight the glass was still there, After the refusal of the night watch, I said to him: `Then I want you to go to Doctor Jekyll' (I, of course, called him by his right name but to do so now would be to prove myself as brutal as Mr Hyde himself; `Tell him to come here at once and loosen this jacket. I can't endure the torture much longer. After fighting two years to regain my reason, I believe I'll lose it again. You have always treated me kindly. For God's sake, get the doctor!' `I can't leave the main building at this time,' the night watch said (Jekyll-Hyde lived in a house about one-eighth of a mile distant, but within the hospital grounds.) `Then will you take a message to the assistant physician who stays here?' (A colleague of Jekyll-Hyde had apartments in the main building.) `I'll do that,' he replied. `Tell him how I'm suffering. Ask him to please come here at once and ease this straitjacket. If he doesn't, I'll be as crazy by morning as I ever was. Also tell him I'll kill myself unless he comes, and I can do it, too. I have a piece of glass in this room and I know just what I'll do with it.' The night watch was as good as his word. He afterwards told me that he had delivered my message: The doctor ignored it. He did not come near me that night, nor the next day, nor did Jekyll-Hyde appear until his usual round of inspection about eleven o'clock the next morning. `I understand that you have a piece of glass which you threatened to use for a suicidal purpose last night,' he said, when he appeared. `Yes, I have, and it's not your fault or the other doctor's that I am not dead. Had I gone mad, in my frenzy I might have swallowed that glass.' `Where is it?' asked the doctor, incredulously. As my straitjacket rendered me arm less, I presented the glass to Jekyll-Hyde on the tip of a tongue he had often heard, but never before seen. 

Clifford Beers, A Mind that Found Itself. An Autobiography ( 1923 )