This, as well as many other instances throughout Ten Days in a Mad-House, exemplifies that patients deemed insane were stripped of their free will within the asylum and other hospital settings. This was common even outside of the institutions that Bly visited, as is evidenced through the writings of several other former patients of other asylums, described in “Reports from the Nineteenth-Century Asylum.” “Treatment is similarly skewed in favor of medical authority. Not much care seems to be given to patient perspectives; Davis notes that an attendant answers for the patient to the doctor on rounds (Two Years and Three Months, 145-146),” as described by one patient. While this is not explicitly an example of non-normative gendered behavior or the discipline of it, a strong authoritative structure allows for the control of patient actions. By not allowing patients to even refute their diagnosed insanity, it sends a message that the behavior and actions of patients can and will be controlled by asylum staff, if they deem that behavior undesirable.