The doctors’ committee’s decision to uphold Alice Gould’s discharge resolves the immediate question of whether she may leave the sanatorium, but it does not resolve the contradiction at the heart of her case. The committee unanimously allows her freedom after hearing María Luisa Fernández’s account, even though the members know Alice is ill. Its final vote distinguishes a patient’s liberty from a declaration that she is entirely well—and turns a seemingly simple ballot into a measure of how difficult it is to judge her.

The question before the committee

The vote comes after the committee has heard María Luisa Fernández relate the truth about Alice’s condition. César Arellano has already concluded that Alice can be released without danger to herself or others and return home; medical observation there may be recommended, but is not a condition of her freedom. Dolores Bernardos supports a collective decision, yet insists that a majority is not enough after hearing the account. The issue is whether the certificate of mental health already given to Alice should be withdrawn.

That question has a procedural history. Alice believes she entered voluntarily and tells Samuel Alvar that she came of her own accord as a professional detective, not as his patient. Alvar answers by pointing to the file: rather than the signed request and admission certificate associated with voluntary treatment, it records the procedures for involuntary admission. The papers include a medical certificate from E. Donadío and an application by Alice’s husband, Heliodoro Almenara. Alice’s conviction that she chose to enter therefore collides with the institutional record that gives others authority over her confinement.

The distinction matters beyond the paperwork. Alice reasons that a voluntary patient can leave almost as readily as she entered, whereas release after a family request and medical recommendation is not hers to decide alone. Alvar likewise frames her admission as a response to an alleged illness and a commitment by the hospital to try to cure her. The committee’s decision must consequently do more than assess a diagnosis: it must decide whether the hospital’s authority to detain her still stands.

A case argued through competing accounts

Alice has repeatedly challenged the hospital’s interpretation of her story. When Alvar questions her as a patient, she is stunned by his refusal to acknowledge her account of herself as a detective. At the doctors’ meeting, she says she can prove that the other part of her story is true and that she wrote the letter at issue. The dispute is not merely over whether she has symptoms; it is also over whether her explanations count as evidence or are dismissed as symptoms because they come from a patient.

Her investigative role gives that conflict a concrete form. In a police inquiry, a commissioner asks her to dictate what she observed and deduced from the dead. The episode establishes Alice as someone who claims to reason from evidence, while the asylum’s file identifies her through a diagnosis and the allegation that she tried three times to poison her husband. At the committee meeting, those descriptions remain in tension: her account is not automatically vindicated, but neither can the medical record alone settle what happened.

A question raised by José Muescas further complicates the allegation against Heliodoro. If he had truly been the victim of three attempted poisonings, Muescas asks, why did he not report Alice to a judge? He suggests that Heliodoro might instead have wanted control over her property by becoming her legal guardian. This is presented as a suspicion about his interests, not as a finding by the committee. Its relevance is procedural as well as personal: the request that helped place Alice in the hospital came from the very husband whose conduct is under scrutiny.

The ballot and its reversal

Bernardos asks for a decision by secret ballot. The doctors are instructed not to sign their slips and to return them folded. The choice is framed in practical terms: those who think Alice should be allowed to leave are to mark yes; those who think she should remain are to mark NO. The procedure is designed to prevent a signed vote from exposing an individual doctor’s position, while Bernardos’s insistence on unanimity makes every response consequential.

The count appears to produce one NO among the yes votes. The doctor who cast it immediately objects to the apparent meaning of his ballot. He explains that he meant not to withdraw the certificate already given to Alice, and that he wants her to be free. His answer reveals that the negative mark was directed at the proposal to revoke her status, not at her release. The apparent dissent therefore becomes agreement: the committee’s members all support leaving the certificate in force and allowing Alice to go.

The wording of the decision preserves a distinction the proceedings have struggled to maintain. The committee declares Alice mentally sound for the purpose of release, but the narration notes that everyone knew, whether they admitted it or not, that she was ill. The unanimity is thus not a unanimous denial of illness. It is agreement that illness does not, in this case, justify continuing her confinement or undoing the certificate that permits her to leave.

Consequence and significance

The result gives institutional force to Arellano’s conclusion that Alice can be released without danger. Her return home remains compatible with possible medical observation, but the hospital cannot treat observation as a reason to keep her inside. In practical terms, the decision ends the committee’s immediate review of her liberty; in dramatic terms, it closes the confrontation between Alice’s insistence on her own account and the authority of the hospital’s diagnosis and admission file.

The scene’s final irony lies in the vote’s two meanings. The committee formally declares a resident mentally sound, while its members know she is not simply well; the lone NO, which seems to threaten her freedom, proves on clarification to protect it. The decision settles what the hospital will do, not every uncertainty about Alice’s condition or her competing account of events. Its unanimity is therefore both decisive and limited: she may leave, while the question of what her story means remains open.