In the late 1800s it was rumored that insane asylums were treating their patients poorly, subjecting them to neglect, starvation, and abuse. In 1887 Newly established investigative reporter, Nellie Bly, was told to pretend that she was insane and get committed into a hospital. She had instruction to go on with her work and express, in detail, the experiences she went through in the institution. She agreed to it because she wanted to improve the mental hospitals and make sure these allegations were investigated without and conspiracy behind it and to see it first-hand. Once she got out, she published the article about what she saw and went through in the ten days she was there, and later published it as a book, named “10 Days in a Mad-House.” When reading a text like Bly’s, the reader should research and learn the history and culture of the era and setting in which the author is in. Knowing how society operated during the place and time of the reports on some of the asylums creates a clarification of where the author is coming from and what the public knew about the subject at the time. It is also important when reading Bly’s, and other pieces, to know how the subject at matter has evolved throughout different cultures over time, and that what was going on was real and actually happened in the past. Sometimes when reading non-fiction pieces that give historic information, readers don’t realize that just because they weren’t there does not mean it was not a reality for a lot of people. To illustrate how effective it is to research the context within a text, I found two articles and one source that allows readers to place themselves in the late nineteenth century, and understand Bly’s experiences better. The first article is titled “The History of Mental Illness: From Skull Drills to Happy Pills,” by Allison Foerschner, and the second one is titled “A Beautiful Mind: The History of the Treatment of Mental Illness,” by Tasha Stanley. Both of these texts help illustrate and describe the history of the societal stigma of mental illness. They also help understand the way the treatments throughout different cultures led to the result of the experiences Bly went through at Blackwell Island’s women’s asylum.

In order for Bly to successfully be committed, she decided to practice acting insane. Things like pulling her hair, being distant and spacey, and being incoherent at times. She started out at a home, which at the time seemed to be the same thing as what we call a homeless shelter now. The woman of the house thought Bly was crazy, and took her to the police. She stood in front of a judge in hopes to be evaluated as insane and be committed to Blackwell’s island asylum. It began to seem that the more sanely she talked and acted, the more she was seen as insane, rather than when she was acting crazy as she practiced. This can be explained when researching the culture in the late nineteenth century. Women at that time were seen as insane if they were a little too intelligent or even too normal. If a husband did not like that his wife was not acting as the “ideal” housewife at the time, cooking, cleaning, or having more knowledge than she should, the husband could easily claim her to be crazy and have her committed. This is good to know so that one can understand the culture and societal ways of their dealing with “insane women” so loosely. Another way she came across as unusual to the public, was that she seemed poor or homeless, which apparently was not accepted from women more than men. When in court, one of the police officers, in hopes of proving she was insane, pointed out and said “That girl is from the west” (Bly) and made the comment that her accent sounded as if it were western. This means that at that time, women from the west were considered “trouble.” In order to understand why, I researched and found a source to explain how women were perceived in the west in the late eighteen hundred. The source I found is by two authors, Dave and Kathy, titled “Painted Ladies of the Old West.” It explains that most women were either “painted ladies or saloon and dance hall girls” (Dave) which today would be the same as prostitutes, or what we would now consider an escort of some sort. This behavior was illegal in most places, and on the east coast, it seems that it was even less tolerable and seen as more sinful, making Bly look bad to the police officer. This explanation describes a glimpse of how women were stereotyped based off of random things like sin, sexual activity, or even where they are from, which is necessary to understand as a reader.

Next, a doctor evaluates her and once again when she acts sane, they consider her to be insane, rather than when she is pulling on her hair or acting incoherent. Overall, she observed cold baths, forced starvation, abuse, threats of sexual assault, and a lack of what is supposed to be a healthcare environment. Her first incident was a night when it was freezing, yet the nurses kept the windows open for some reason. The nurses were layered in clothing, while all the patients had torn shawls to wear. When Bly complained, a nurse stated “’People on charity should not expect anything and should not complain’” (Bly). This shows that in society, these institutions were seen as “charity” and not an actual medical facility with the intention to actually help the patients. As one of her doctors evaluates her in the report, he implies that she is sexually active and might be a prostitute, and that she is demented because of this. I personally think that because of the information earlier stated, that women from the west were thought of prominently as prostitutes, that is why he thinks that. Then, she was dragged to her first meal where she was forced to stand and wait for 45 minutes and then made to sit on backless benches. The food consisted of bread, old butter, and things she called “inedible” that she could not eat, even though she has been starving for days. This is when she realizes that the treatments were making the patients crazier than when they came to the hospital.

Bly was also dragged to a bathroom and they ripped her clothes off when she refused to undress, and made her get in a bath filled with the coldest water, where they scrubbed her down roughly. She stated that at some points it felt like she was drowning, and the trauma made her not be able to sleep. She also noted that they never change the bath water, and they use the same towel for all the patients. She describes vividly horrific sights, including what they called a “rope gang” where women were strung together with leather belts around their waists, sobbing, crying, and even screaming. They were forced to stay morning to night and were beaten for moving or speaking. It was also obvious that some women were put there just because they were foreign and spoke little English. A woman name Mrs. Cotter told Bly that she was sent somewhere, where the nurses beat her, choked her, attempted to drown her, and pulled her hair from the roots. Another woman who was put into the “Rope gang” said the same thing except that they threatened to beat her if she told the doctors, and that they broke two of her ribs. Chemical abuse was also apparent when the nurses would inject the patients with morphine and chloral in order to make them seem even more crazy than they were. In the end, Bly describes the asylum to be a metaphorical “Human Rat-trap . . . easy to get in, impossible to get out” (Bly). Her final thought, and her most important point is that if anything, the treatment that was given made the women more insane than they were in the beginning. She implies that they might not have even been insane, but rather been made insane by the experiences. Bly asks in the end “What excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment?” (Bly).

In Allison Foerschner’s “The History of Mental Illness: From Skull Drills to Happy Pills,” she maps out the history and different ways that the treatments and culture’s social stigmas on mental illness’s have changed over time. She states that “Treating mental illness dates back to 5,000 BCE” (Foerschner), in which people believed that the causes were caused by supernatural happenings such as demons or an angry deity. So they used spiritual healing, that could often lead to abusive outcomes. Later in history came a practice of drilling holes into the skull with unpractical tools, believing that this would create a hole for evil to leave the human’s body. Spiritual healing though, was still evident and still is today in some places, meaning the practice of prayer and atonement were to drive out the evil. Now, the idea of confining the mentally ill person came from Greece, when they would take them and lock them away, for the sake of the family’s image in the community. In society, people thought that if a family member was insane, that it was hereditary, and that the entire family was this way. This is an example of how treatment evolved to get to what Bly experienced in her writing. Asylums are an explicit example of confinement by being a place where family members and people in society can just drop off the “insane” and know that it will be almost impossible for them to get out. Another example of a treatment that can be linked to the late nineteenth century was the beginning of the practice of using sedatives on patients. In the 17th century, patients were given “opium, grains, and unguents to ease the torment” (Foerschner). An asylum named Saint Mary of Bethlehem would have staff put violent patients out on display so the public could view them. This eventually spread to America, and I think is apparent in Bly’s description of the “rope gang” where they were forced to sit outside roped together all day for the staff’s amusement. The cold baths that she describes also show up in history. They were believed to help give a shock to the brain and make the patient stable. Overtime, this escalated to abuse or electric shock therapy, which would knock the patient unconscious. Reforms began to come into play in the mid eighteen hundred. This fell back in the late eighteen hundred because immigration caused tension, as also apparent in Bly’s discovery, that the staff would get annoyed and abuse patients who spoke little English. More sedatives came about such as chloryl hydrate, bromides, and in the mid nineteen hundred, Valium and Prozac. I used this article in order to present a historical understanding of the treatment of mental illness in order to recognize where the treatment that Bly engaged in stemmed from. 

In Tasha Stanley’s “A Beautiful Mind: The History of the Treatment of Mental Illness,” she starts out by stating her personal opinion, that most treatments of mental illness throughout history “create vegetables out of patients. . . making ghosts of their previous selves” (Stanley), which can be linked to what Bly finishes her book with. She says that the asylums make the sane people actually insane. Stanley explains that there was a social stigma on mental illness for years, that is similar to the example from Foerschner that she gives about Greece. Stanley describes that in China, they hid their families so the community wouldn’t think that the reason for a member’s mental illness stemmed from immoral behavior or sin. Once again in history, yet in a different country, the same confinement idea that was formed into asylums was practiced again. If the person was abandoned and put on the streets instead, police actually put them in jails or dungeons. The view on sexes also effected treatment because women were treated differently from men. Conditions that made a woman considered crazy would be depression after birthing, stress, anxiety, talking too much, not talking enough, etc. This puts things in perspective for me as a woman because it makes me realize that I could identify with these “flaws” and I would have been locked up if I were in Bly’s era. This understanding gives me equal footing with where Bly is at in her experiences. Later in history, reformists came about, which can also be seen in Bly’s text when she describes the one doctor that was kind and understanding. This article gives a different understanding than Foerschner’s by giving examples that can be linked even more directly to what Bly describes in “10 Days in a Mad-House.”

Nellie Bly’s investigative reporting gave illustration and explanation of how mental illness was treated throughout the late nineteenth century, especially from the view of a woman. By reading her text, a reader can get context from her text. By researching the context, a person can go back to the text and understand it better or get an improved perspective on it. In order to do so one has to research the history and culture of the time and place that the author wrote the piece. A reader should be aware of the societal difference between modern day and the past on a subject, so that they can compare and see how similar or different things are between now and then. My two articles and source from the second paragraph illustrate how exactly this works and how effective it is. I believe that my understanding of Bly’s piece is more clear now after researching what exactly was going on in the late eighteen hundred, and I would advise all readers to do the same when it comes to historical reading like this.
