As readers, it is our job to understand the piece past the words on the pages. A majority of the time, what we read is generally very powerful, and just the words do not do the piece justice. It is important, as the audience, to understand the history of the piece and further our knowledge about it to help put the writing into context. Just reading a text and understanding what is written undercuts the author, making their hard work and effort meaningless. It is the responsibility of the reader to understand the context, the history, and the time period in which pieces are written to gain a greater understanding of what we are reading. By looking into the history and culture of “Ten Days in a Mad-House”, we can gain further knowledge into why a young journalist from a small town outside of Pittsburgh, Nellie Bly, is considered by many to not only be one of the bravest and most courageous ladies of her time, but every bit of a hero as well. With her career ready to take off, Bly risked everything she had, including her life, to infiltrate a system of extreme corruptness and injustice to make her mark on American History and finally put an end to a long overdue issue. Through an in-depth historical and cultural analysis of Nellie Bly’s “Ten Days in a Mad-House, we are going to learn first-hand how background knowledge can help readers more efficiently understand a text, which is going to prove not only the danger Bly faced on her mission, but also the heroism she now deserves. 

Unheard of in the Victorian Age, a woman’s journalism career was taking off in a market dominated by the male presence. Bly continued producing piece after piece where her findings would surprise just about anyone that would read them. After publishing an exposé based on poor working conditions for women, her career took off. Bly had already amazed many by getting to her current status at the time, but her next move would do nothing less than shock the world. Bly hatched an extremely dangerous and unpredictable plan to infiltrate the extremely corrupt and suppressing world of Insane Asylums in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. 

To further our understanding of Bly’s motives to put her life at risk, a basic understanding of how corrupt the institutions were during this time frame is important. There were a few notorious asylums in this era that aided in exposing the unethical ways of these institutions and showing how corrupt their systems actually were. The Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane in Buffalo, New York was one of the most notorious asylums ever in the United States. Buffalo State was segregated by floor and severity of illness in hopes of patients making improvements. The building was constructed very thoroughly, with a window in all the rooms and plenty of light. Although it may have looked good on paper, the asylum was guaranteed to fail when it became overcrowded. While writing an article on such conditions, Jason Baker states, “Overcrowding and lack of funding often left patients sleeping in fecal soiled bedding with little to no care” (Baker 1). As if the miserable living conditions were not enough, the “treatment” the patients received was hardly treatment at all, aside from not even being remotely beneficial. Doctors would basically run experiments on their patients, drilling holes into their heads or electrocuting their brains, turning them into real life zombies. Patients rarely had the opportunity to be discharged, and would usually pass away or were murdered at The Buffalo State Asylum. 

In congruence, patients of The Essex County Hospital Center in Cedar Grove, New Jersey faced very similar living conditions as the patients of The Buffalo State Asylum and other mentally unstable citizens nationwide. However, unique to only Essex County was a treatment process named Transorbital Lobotomy. Baker explains Transorbital Lobotomy as “constant hammering a stick-like object through the eye socket of the patient in hopes of severing the connections to the brain” (Baker 1). I would hope that patients were subdued before treatment, but without credible documentation to prove it, the chances are pretty slim. Due to infection, survival rates from treatments like this were almost nonexistent. Even though trying to gain information from this time period is near impossible, since The Essex County Hospital was the center for Transorbital Lobotomy, it will go down in history as the deadliest insane asylum ever on American soil. The living conditions in these particular institutions parallel what was seen nationwide at this time with the mental health industry, and instead of providing the slightest bit of help, the patients, already enduring unstable conditions, rapidly deteriorated once checked in. 

After carefully examining two of the deadliest and most disgraceful institutions in the United States, it is still important to realize that this was not just a problem prevalent in the United States, but similar and sometimes even worse conditions existed worldwide. 

Through thorough research, there was one asylum notorious for being arguably the worst mental institution ever built. Patients faced conditions only comparable to those of hell, and the world had never seen anything so drastically revolting to this extent before. Operating in London, Bethlem Royal Hospital was the epitome of evil, as it took poor living conditions to a whole new level—a level of unbearableness. A Bethlem Royal specialist and devoted asylum advocate, Julie Hutchings, wrote her own piece on this terrible place. She states, “built over a sewer, the overflow of waste actually blocked the entrance often. One wooden cistern in the back yard was the only wanter supply to the large facility, and water had to be carried in a bucket into the building, to provide water for the patients and for all cleaning purposes. There were pots in the rooms for the residents to use as toilets, but as they were generally left unattended to roam the hospital the buckets usually ended up smeared and thrown at staff, passersyby out the window, and each other” (Hutchings 1). As if these conditions were not bad enough, the residents were intentionally starved in hopes that without food they would not be as wild and out of control. Hutchings continues and states that, “the disturbed were chained up to walls and posts like dogs. They slept on beds of straw only as the water supply did not allow for washing of linens” (Hutchings 1). Up until the hospital was moved to a different location in the early 1900’s, people would pay to enter the asylum and see the patients, as if the institution was a zoo exhibit. Sometimes customers would go as far as poking the patients with sticks or even throwing miscellaneous objects at them. There was no place worse than the Bethlem Royal Hospital. As it was so corrupt, their patients did not even remotely have a fighting chance of receiving the treatment they needed. Once a patient was checked into Bethlem Royal, it was only a matter of time until their demise. Ultimately, death was inevitable behind the walls of the Bethlem death chamber.

After examining both, institutions in the United States and institutions overseas, it is also important to understand and learn the historical significance as to why Bly set her sights on helping women specifically. Yes, Bly is a woman, so she inherently had a reason for wanting to help her own, but women were the ones subjected to harsher conditions. At this time, women had absolutely no chance to make decisions for themselves, as they would take orders from the male figure in their lives. Just about any man could deem a woman mentally insane if he had any desire to, and her life, in turn, would be tarnished. Anything from moral insanity to a woman forgetting to complete a common household task could be a warning of insanity or instability to her husband or lover. Sometimes instead of divorce or separating, a husband would choose to claim his wife or partner insane as punishment for her behavior. Whether these claims prove to be true or not, the woman evidently was sent away indefinitely. The women were sent by the wagon full to the asylums, and as previously stated, they had no chance to recover from a disease that most of them did not even have to begin with, as it was all made up. Upon arrival, the true brutality began. Facing many of the same conditions previously examined, more and more hope was lost every single day. It was only a matter of time for these women, and the vast majority of them had no business being there in the first place.

Armed with a better understanding of current issues within the asylums at the time and the history of these institutions, a much greater appreciation for the courageous actions of Nellie Bly is gained. Bly was writing piece after piece and beating down the women’s segregation barrier in Victorian Era journalism. With a dream and a little bit of scrounged up money, Bly packed up her bags and made the move to New York City. Upon arriving in New York, Bly would begin her life-threatening quest to change the world forever. For the next couple of weeks, Bly posed as insane, solely to get checked into the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. She went as far as telling workers that she could not sleep at night because of the people in her head and the voices she could hear. The first step of Nellie’s plan was complete. She had infiltrated the island, but at this point, she still had no idea how she would ever get off of Blackwell’s Island. After ten days on this nearly guaranteed death mission, Nellie was able to make her way off of the island with exactly what she set out for—a first-hand account of the brutality and corruption on the island. Nellie either witnessed or endured just about anything you could think of. The most out of control inmates were tied together with rope, the food was served in the same area as human feces, rodents crawled all over, sometimes even biting the patients, but as crazy as it sounds, this is the exact environment Bly set out to find. In the end, Bly was able to expose the government and their lack of care and funding for the mental health institutions nationwide. 

Following her stay at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island, Bly immediately published her book “Ten Days in a Mad-House”, which almost instantaneously launched a nationwide investigation into the treatment of the mentally ill. Nellie Bly fulfilled every goal that she set out to achieve, and caused a huge uproar in the mental health industry, which eventually led to countless reforms. Through conducting studies and research of the cultural and historical context of Nellie’s book, we can further understand the true conditions and circumstances Nellie Bly was willing to endure to bring about change within the mental health field. A small town girl from just outside of Pittsburgh put all the courage she has ever had and every bit of information she has ever learned to the test to create a positive change in the world, and that is why Nellie Bly will go down in history as one of America’s many heroes. 
