Nonfiction · 1887
Ten Days in a Mad-House; Or, Nellie Bly’s Experience on Blackwell’s Island.
Feigning Insanity in Order to Reveal Asylum Horrors. The Trying Ordeal of the New York World’s Girl Correspondent.
Twenty-three-year-old reporter Nellie Bly checks into a working-women's boardinghouse, practices a blank, unsettling stare in the mirror, and sets out to convince a judge, several doctors, and the New York City asylum system that she is insane — an assignment from Joseph Pulitzer's New York World with no guarantee of how, or whether, she would ever get out again. Once committed to the asylum on Blackwell's Island, Bly drops the act entirely and simply reports what she sees: patients tied together and marched through the cold without adequate clothing, freezing baths administered as punishment, sane immigrant women held indefinitely for the crime of not speaking English, and nurses who beat and choked the patients in their charge. Her exposé, published immediately upon her release, forced a grand jury investigation and won a $1,000,000 annual increase in the city's asylum funding — and established undercover immersion, rather than simply asking questions, as a tool of American investigative journalism.
Ten Days in a Mad-House was published in 1887 after its original serialization in the New York World.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text, including Bly's own introduction on the story's reception and the transcript of the grand jury investigation her reporting prompted.
Contents
- Introduction
- Chapter I — A Delicate Mission
- Chapter II — Preparing for the Ordeal
- Chapter III — In the Temporary Home
- Chapter IV — Judge Duffy and the Police
- Chapter V — Pronounced Insane
- Chapter VI — In Bellevue Hospital
- Chapter VII — The Goal in Sight
- Chapter VIII — Inside the Mad-House
- Chapter IX — An Expert(?) at Work
- Chapter X — My First Supper
- Chapter XI — In the Bath
- Chapter XII — Promenading with Lunatics
- Chapter XIII — Choking and Beating Patients
- Chapter XIV — Some Unfortunate Stories
- Chapter XV — Incidents of Asylum Life
- Chapter XVI — The Last Good-Bye
- Chapter XVII — The Grand Jury Investigation
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Subjects
- N.Y. City Lunatic Asylum
- Bly, Nellie, 1864-1922
- Mentally ill — Commitment and detention — New York (State) — History — 19th century
- Psychiatric hospitals — New York (State) — History — 19th century
- Psychiatric hospital care — New York (State) — History — 19th century
- Women — Mental health services — New York (State) — History — 19th century
- Women patients — New York (State) — History — 19th century
About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Source mind
About the author
1864–1922 · Victorian
Nellie Bly was the pen name of Elizabeth Jane Cochrane (1864–1922), born near Cochran's Mills, Pennsylvania, who began writing for the Pittsburgh Dispatch at eighteen after a column dismissing women as unfit for anything but housework provoked her to send the editor an anonymous rebuttal so forceful he hired her instead. Moving to Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in 1887, she got herself committed to the asylum on Blackwell's Island by feigning insanity, and her resulting exposé, Ten Days in a Mad-House, led to a grand jury investigation and a large increase in the city's asylum funding — establishing a new, more dangerous kind of undercover investigative reporting. In 1889–90 she circled the globe in 72 days, beating the fictional record of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days and becoming an international celebrity. She largely left journalism after marrying the manufacturer Robert Seaman in 1895, running his ironworks company as its president after his death until a decade of embezzlement by employees forced it into bankruptcy, then returned to reporting, covering the Eastern Front during the First World War as one of the first women war correspondents. She died in New York at fifty-seven.
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