The newspaper series, which later turned into a full book by Nellie Bly, Ten Days in a Madhouse is a documentative report on the goings-on of mental asylums in the middle of the Victorian Era. The Victorian Era lasted an unprecedentedly long time from the year 1837 when queen Victory took the throne to her death in 1901. This means 64 years and over 3 generations of changing opinions, historical events, and medical advancements. The Victorian Era is well known for many reasons; statement architecture, conservative clothing, the industrial revolution, and yes, even the deplorably horrifying conditions of mentally ill patient care. Using two historical sources, I will show how Nellie Bly’s testimony was an accurate portrayal of how inept Victorian asylums were.

Nellie Bly emphasizes the subjugation of women in mental institutions due largely to the social stigma that people had over women at the time. In 1851, Charles Dickens visited St. Luke’s Hospital, where he noted that out of the 18,759 patients admitted in the asylum’s history, 11,162 were female. He later concluded “Female servants are, as is well known, more frequently afflicted with lunacy than any other class of persons.” (Scull 313). This raises a few questions; Why were women more frequently admitted to institutions than men? Are the pressures and responsibilities of servant people so much that they cause mental breakdowns? Dickens believed it was due to their precarity of their economic situation. A visiting journalist to Bethlem Hospital was told that most female patients were “governesses and the wives of badly-paid clerks”.  Nellie Bly observes in her interview that the doctor “gave the nurse more attention than he did me, and asked her six questions to every one of me,” and that “he took no notice of my remarks” (Reader 284). With the stigma that women were less than men, it comes as no surprise that their voices were more quickly ignored, especially when seen as the ramblings of a mad-person. The opinions of women, sane or insane, were often the background noise to many goings on; an explanation of why so many women found themselves in the good company of equally-sane women. 

Speaking on the order of wrongful imprisonment, (which Bly claims is the case in some of her asylum companions) in the early eighteenth-century, a man named Daniel Defoe claimed that private asylums had become the dumping ground of unwanted wives under the false pretense of insanity. (Scull 339) He went on the request that private asylums be closed, or at least severely regulated. Private madhouses were allowed to carry on until 1774 when the ‘Madhouse Act’ was passed, which attempted to put an end to the wrongful imprisoning of innocent people. This act however, accompanied by many following movements, proved to be ineffective and left room for loopholes that let sane persons slip through the cracks.

The source ‘Victorian Lunatics’ claims that (as described by Dr. John Conolly) patients were stripped, “gently” moved into the bath-room where “the comfort of a warm bath” waited for them. They are then transferred to the ‘day-room’ where they are served “good and prepared food” (Arieno 72). Bly, however, recounts a different tale where she was not only forcefully stripped bare, in front of the other women, but presented a bathtub of ice cold water and roughly scrubbed down. When it came to eating, the food was “pinkish-looking stuff […] bread, cut thick and buttered […] five prunes”, hardly the warm, prepared meal that Dr. Conolly promised. 

In addition to the forceful imprisonment, staff members were known to regularly grow tired of patients and use their positions of power to excuse beatings. Bly confesses that the nurses took one rowdy patient and “knocked her head” and “actually choked her” (Reader 297). In the present-day state of mental treatment, such brutalities would result in sanctions or even forced closure. These accusations are backed up in “Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen”, in a passage that claims lunatics were “confined in dark and reeking cells, strapped down to their beds or to chairs”. It is possible conclusion that these conditions were over looked for so long because the common people really didn’t care about what happened on the insides of asylums, so long as the ‘undesirables’ were kept away from proper society. Victorians were so caught up in everything being buttoned up, proper, and by no means erratic. Seeing as these lunatics didn’t fit the mold of eighteenth-nineteenth century England, citizens were content to see their strangers, friends, and even family members removed from the public eye. 

Bly also had a companion at the asylum, one Miss Tillie Mayard. Miss Mayard suffered from a ‘recent illness’ which seemed to grow progressively worse in her duration of observance at the asylum. Knowing she was not well, the nurses administered the same ice-cold bath to “that sick girl”. Bly persists that “Her limbs shook and her teeth chattered,” but the attendants refused to provide any more protection from the cold than was awarded to the other inmates. For a society that valued the connection between physical and mental health, it comes as a surprise that they would allow her illness to go so drastically untreated. Victorian Doctors believed “the mind and body are so connected that there can scarcely be a disease of either in which the other is not involved” (Scull 151) and yet they so blatantly disregarded their own ill patients, not comprehending how their sanity doesn’t upturn in such deplorable conditions. Though man doctors in private institutions didn’t care much if the unwanted people in their asylums honestly benefitted from their stay, as many were just holding cells for unwanted people who had unknowingly committed some un-pleasantry to another. 

The Victorian Era was a time of many changes and advancements in technology. Although we now consider the inhumane treatment of mentally ill people to be wrong and criminal, at the time it was the only known way to help their illnesses. Before people could treat illnesses from the inside, they treated them from the outside. The people of the era also considered mentally ill people to be lesser or defective, allowing doctors to test out whatever practices they wanted on the unfortunate hospital patients. The deplorable conditions were only accepted because the stigma made the general populous believe people with mental illness were less than people who didn’t have disabilities. There was also a feeling of shame for a family to have a disabled child, so asylums provided a great way to ‘sweep them under the rug’, so to speak. It was because of this ‘unwanted nature’ that doctors found mental patients easy pray for whatever malpractice they decided to employ. 



Marlene Arieno covers a wide basis in her book, Victorian Lunatics. These include developments in the social, medical, and scientific practices of the time. She also covers myths about asylums and how their patients were treated. She also offers up figures on population statistics including gender, sex vs. age comparisons, marital status and even literacy. Included is also a segment on disorder breakdowns and the causes of said disorders and diagnosis. Arieno goes into detail about the comparisons between people of different economic status, mental impairments, and other categorical characteristics. She also covers the bureaucracy of Victorian sanatoriums. This includes different government acts regarding the ‘insane’, their treatment, and the maintaining of mental asylums. The text also references some of the symptoms, analyses, and traits of mental illness as seen through the eyes of the Victorian doctors who treated them. Psychological practices, beliefs, and developments are a topic in which Arieno talks about in length.

This source will be especially useful in examining the cultural aspects of mental illness and how they were treated in Victorian society. With it I can compare the text to the cultural society of the late 1800’s and how their culture viewed the mental illnesses that doctors of the Victorian Era treated on a regular basis. I intend to use this source to discuss how this society viewed people with mental illness, especially along the lines of age, gender, or race. The tables displaying the occupational, status, and literacy could prove to make interesting data points for who was admitted into asylums during this time. I also intend to discuss the treatment of patients admitted to mental wards based on the social opinion of mental illness at the time, as many people found the patients at asylums to be useless vegetables, so medical practices were invasive and impractical. This text could easily relate to the complexity that the passage from ‘Ten days in a Madhouse’ based on gender specific treatment of different ailments, and the varied public opinion of a variety of mental illnesses like ‘hysteria’, ‘insanity’, and ‘lunacy’, which have very loose medical definitions and are more of a legal description than anything.  


 Scull begins by describing Victorians in detail, the characteristics that made up people of the mid nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He mentions some of the horrible living conditions experienced by ‘lunatics’ including chains, dark solitude, and starvation. He recounts a brief history of Victorian developments in patient treatment and psychiatry. This book contains a wide variety of information on Victorian asylums, psychiatry, and lunatics. It sheds light on some misconceptions, dark truths, and horror stories. 

I found this book to be especially useful as it contained not only factual information, but stories and inside opinions from people living and reviewing conduct at the time. After a general overview, Scull delves into rationales, therapy in psychiatry; both new and old. He considers the morality of the time and how the British considered mental patients. This is very important for comparing people in Ten Days in a Madhouse to other historic sources. There is a specific section about Victorian women and their condemnation to institutions that proved to be extremely valuable in my comparisons, as it had nothing but fantastic information about how women were treated, why they were committed, and various other informational aspects of women’s stays in mental asylums. He also mentions wrongful confinement, an issue prevalent in the text I will be analizing.