Life Of Nellie Bly
Ten days in a madhouse
Elizabeth Jane Cochran was born during the 1860s in Pennsylvania. After her father’s death, her mother married another guy. Elizabeth wanted to be a teacher, but because of the family’s financial crisis, she couldn’t complete her studies. Elizabeth and her mother was running a boarding house. Reading newspapers was her favourite hobby.
And one day, when she noticed an article with some negative picturisation of women in Pittsburgh Dispatch, she was upset. She wrote a letter to the editor regarding this. The editor was surprised and even offered Elizabeth a job as a columnist. And when she started writing newspapers she took the pen name, Nellie Bly. It was uncommon for the women those days to raise their voice against anything what's happening around them. Women were only writing about cooking recipes and gardening. But Bly was a popular writer, even though she could point out any issues that concerned women alone.
However, Bly had this great desperation to write about the nation, politics, all the citizens, both men and women. Nellie moved to New York City. She approached the New York World for a job, but being a female, she wasn’t offered the job. When she said, she could do anything, the Chief Editor Pulitzer asked her to investigate the brutality and neglect that is happening in the infamous Women’s Lunatic Asylum in Blackwell’s Island.
Any patient who once entered the asylum never came out of it. This itself posed as a big question in front of Nellie. She had to pretend to be a patient to get into the asylum. A week before she went in, she was practising to make weird faces, to irritate people actions. As planned earlier, she started acting crazy in her boarding house, the inmates and warden were so afraid that they arranged a doctor and she was taken to the Blackwell Women’s Lunatic Asylum. She repeatedly said “I am Nellie Brown, from Cuba, my trunks are missing”. And the life of this 23-year-old detective began.
For 10 days, Bly lived with women who were suicidal, poor, malnourished, violent and even perfectly sane women who unwillingly clung to the asylum.
Nelly Bly was horrified drinking the “ copper tasting coffee”. Rotten Bread and rancid butter was the only food. The torments were so intolerable. Every patients were freezing. They all looked blue because of the cold. The sheets were just 3 feet long. One long sheet/blanket was torn into 4 – 5 pieces and distributed. She was forced to take an ice-cold bath in dirty water with other patients. There were only two towels for 50 patients.
“My teeth chattered and my limbs were goose-fleshed and blue with cold. Suddenly I got, one after the other, three buckets of water over my head — ice cold water, too — into my eyes, my ears, my nose and my mouth. I think I experienced the sensation of a drowning person as they dragged me, gasping, shivering and quaking, from the tub. For once I did look insane.”
They were not given undergarments, but some rags made of used clothes. Another disturbing experience Bly had was making the patients sit on a bench, without moving or talking from 6 AM to 8 PM, fourteen hours every day.
Bly thought if she was staying there for a few more days like this, she is really going to be an insane or crazy person. “Two months here would make me a mental and physical wreck,” Bly wrote.
Nellie Bly talked to every woman as she could. Some of the sane women couldn’t make any claims that they are sane, just because they were poor and were sure that they would die of hunger, if they go out of asylum. There were also immigrants who didn’t understand English, who were forcefully put in the asylum.
“For crying, the nurses beat me with a broom-handle and jumped on me, injuring me internally, so that I shall never get over it. The nurse then tied my hands and feet, threw a sheet over my head to muffle my screams and put me in a bathtub of cold water.They held me under until I gave up every hope and became senseless.” — Mrs.Cotter
They were beaten and was pulled around by the hair, held under the water chocked and kicked. They were also hanged upside down for misbehaving or talking back. Whenever they tried to complain it to the doctor, it was always considered as the imagination of their diseased brains. The nurses found pleasure in seeing violent patients to do their worst and drugged them with additional morphine. Bly took notes of everything.
After spending 10 days in the asylum, Pulitzer took help of lawyers to release Bly. She was always regretting for letting the other women stay there.
After forty-eight hours, Nellie Bly published the first part of her investigation, in the New York World, with the stunning headline “Inside the Madhouse”. People across the world were shocked, the news spread across the oceans. Many awards came in search of this twenty-three-year-old journalist
The court investigated the asylum and the officials added nearly $1 million to the asylum’s budget. Bly then combined all the newspaper articles and wrote a book called “Ten Days in a Madhouse”. Bly did another explosive news by travelling all around the world in 72 days, challenging the book “Around the World in 80 Days”, by Jules Verne.
She died of pneumonia in 1922 at age 57. But she is the women who gave rise to a new age newspaper writing. Furthermore, she is the first one who developed a practice now called investigative journalism.
