[1] Her prominence came from her remarkable experience, being confined and unlawfully imprisoned in the Utica Lunatic Asylum for 26 months (October 1880 – December 1882),[2] through a plot of a secret enemy to kill her.

He succeeded in obtaining a writ of habeas corpus, and Judge George G. Barnard of the New York Supreme Court pronounced Lathrop sane and unlawfully incarcerated.

[4] Lathrop felt she owed it to women to take her case before the New York State Legislature, and demand reform in this direction, but she was unsuccessful in two efforts and found herself penniless and facing the need to support herself.

After several efforts, she became a court stenographer, and ten years after her release, wrote a book, the story of her own institutionalization, entitled A Secret Institution.

Lathrop's father died in 1877 leaving his wife, and his three daughters to open their home to board strangers for income.

[2] When Lathrop's life was saved on two occasions by friends, she took some of the aconite-poisoned tea to a chemist for analysis, as she sought reliable proof before making open charges against any one.

[9] She was sent to the asylum at the insistence of her mother and sisters, who lived in Rochester, and who asserted that Lathrop was suffering from the delusion that somebody was trying to poison her.

After making another fruitless effort the succeeding year, she found herself homeless and penniless, and dependent upon a cousin's generosity for shelter and support, forced to begin her new life under the most difficult circumstances.

Ten years after her release, she wrote her book, A Secret Institution, which was a history of her own life, written in the style of a novel, and descriptive of what she experienced or witnessed while an inmate of the Utica asylum.

[15] Keeping true to her vow “to devote the rest of [her] life to the cause of the insane,” Lathrop formed the Lunacy Law Reform and the Anti-Kidnapping Leagues.

The goal of the leagues was to “protect sane people from false imprisonment.” Both groups had helped several individuals who had been unjustly incarcerated secure their freedom.

Lathrop's lawyer gave the following statement of the scope of the lawsuit: Of course the main point is in regard to the interception of letters that she wrote to friends asking for assistance.

One of the things I will do will be to write to the Postmaster General, asking if it would not be advisable in case we can prove that the authorities are wrong in prohibiting the forwarding of letters, to place free delivery boxes in all asylums, that the patients may have a chance to correspond without difficulty with their friends.

I believe such a system would do away with much of the abuse that without doubt exists in many asylums, and would greatly lessen the chance of sane persons being held in confinement.