Notes Extracted from the Casebook of Hieronymous Q. Wilson, M.D. Rutledge Asylum On November 5, 1863, Alice Liddell was severely burned in the fire that destroyed her family home in Oxford, and took the lives of her parents and her older sister, Lizzie. While the girl's seared skin gradually healed during a year of hospitalization, the trauma caused by her family's horrific demise deepened. The orphan's condition swung from comatose to uncontrollably hysterical and back in the course of a given hour. Leaned medical opinion deemed her a danger to herself and an indefinite term of institutional confinement was ordered.