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Nellie Bly was one of the most famous female journalists of her day. She gained her fame by feigning mental illness to gain admittance to the Blackwell? Island asylum, writing about her ten days there in The New York World.
Her articles caused a scandal and led to major reforms at the facility.
Undercover Journalist
After writing about sweatshop conditions at the Pittsburgh Dispatch in 1885, Nellie Bly, a female reporter who used her pen name from a Stephen Foster song, wanted to do more investigative work. Her editors at the newspaper had confined her to the women’s page and she was hungry for more challenging assignments. After storming into the offices of Joseph Pulitzer, owner of New York’s largest mass-circulation newspaper, the World, Bly pitched him a story about immigrants in America. He turned her down, but challenged her to investigate one of the city’s infamous mental asylums, Blackwell’s Island.
Bly feigned mental illness to be admitted into the asylum and spent ten days and nights witnessing the alleged abuses firsthand. She even interviewed other patients, who claimed nurses often verbally and physically abused them. During her stay, she gathered evidence such as inedible food, filthy living conditions and cold showers. Bly’s articles were a hit with the World, which prompted a grand jury to visit the asylum to examine its poor conditions for themselves. Apparently, the workers had been tipped off, because when Bly and the grand jury arrived, the asylum had scrubbed down and the food and water was fresh and clean.
After Bly’s series and book on her experience at the asylum were published, the hospital and asylum were forced to improve their practices. She went on to write about a variety of other topics, including women’s rights and social reforms, before she died from pneumonia in 1922.
Ten Days in a Madhouse
Bly was 23 and one of only a few female reporters in the city when she accepted an assignment to go undercover as a patient at Blackwell?s Island, a psychiatric hospital then located a short ferry ride from Manhattan. She would spend 10 days there, exposing abuses at the facility and the city?s neglect of the mentally ill.
The facility crammed 1,600 patients, and many were not really insane but rather poor people from recent immigrants or impoverished neighborhoods with no other social support system. During her stay, Bly befriended fellow inmates and exposed rampant psychological and physical mistreatment. Beds were often unmade and filthy, and meals of spoiled meat and stale bread were barely edible. Inmates were tethered together and forced to sit in wet clothes for long periods of time, which led to illnesses.
To avoid detection, Bly practiced acting crazy before she went to the hospital. She would wander the halls and nearby streets, refuse to sleep, runted and yelled incoherently, and even practiced looking crazed in the mirror at home. She was able to keep her identity hidden and avoided the most severe forms of mistreatment, but she did not escape unscathed. Her articles were a sensation and led to significant improvements in funding and management at the hospital.
New York City Municipal Government
Although writers like Charles Dickens and Margaret Fuller had toured insane asylums, Bly wrote of the maltreatment of inmates that was all too common. She claimed nurses physically and emotionally abused patients, inmates had to sleep on the floors of crowded buildings, doctors misdiagnosed and ignored them, food was often inedible, and women were sent to Blackwell’s Island when they could not pay their rent.
Bly was a journalist on the rise and Joseph Pulitzer, editor of The New York World, hired her for her moxie and hands-on approach to reporting. Bly took on the challenge of having herself committed to a lunatic asylum for 10 days in order to expose conditions there. She used her alias Nellie Brown and managed to dupe Matron Mrs. Irene Stenard, residents at The Temporary Home for Females and even the physicians at Bellevue Hospital.
The series of articles Bly published in The World were a sensation. Immediately, city lawmakers and advocates started pushing for more funding to improve treatment in asylums. A grand jury was convened, and Bly accompanied them on their visit to Blackwell’s Island. A month after her series appeared, many of the glaring problems that she exposed had been remedied: nurses and doctors no longer mistreated patients, better food was served, and translators were hired for foreign-born women who did not understand English.
Grand Jury
While Bly is best known for her whirlwind 72-day trip around the world inspired by Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in 80 Days, she also was an investigative journalist, a pioneering woman in journalism and an early women? Suffrage advocate. She is regarded by many, including medical historians and patients’ advocates, as one of the first American (and probably the first female) undercover reporters.
In her series and book on her experiences at Blackwell’s Island, Bly detailed egregious abuses and poor treatment of residents of the facility. She portrayed residents as being subject to psychological and physical abuse by staff, with ice-cold showers, contaminated food and filthy living conditions among the worst of these.
As soon as her articles on Blackwell’s Island appeared in The World, a grand jury panel was quickly tasked with visiting the facility and investigating its operations. The facility was quick to clean up its act: inmates who spoke out against the staff were transferred or released, fresh food and water were brought in, and translators hired for residents who could not speak English.
The grand jury panel did not visit Blackwell’s Island a month after the articles appeared, however. When it finally did, the building was closed and mental health services moved to a new facility on Ward’s Island. Bly’s reports were harrowing, and the public was shocked to learn of the treatment of mentally ill patients in this country.
