Insane Asylums were supposed to help cure people correct? Well they may have done the exact opposite in the early 1900’s. In the asylums in the 1900’s, the treatments the hospitals would use were often thought to be inhumane and not effective. The hospitals back then thought that the treatments they would use were actually helping the patients get cured but they were actually affecting the patients in a negative way. Some of the inhumane treatments included in Ten Days in a Madhouse by, Nellie Bly include, hydrotherapy, a form of drowning, and starvation; these will be compared with two outside sources concerning the matter of these unfair treatments. 

Imagine being treated terrible everyday all day and also being served awful food. That would be enough to drive anyone insane. Nellie Bly discusses her horrible accounts of eating in the asylum. She has an account where the nurses said mean things to her and how awful the food was. One time Nellie asked for another piece of bread when they were at dinner and as she asked and the nurse flung some on the table and said something about how Nellie must have forgotten where she came from and forgotten how to eat (Bly). The patients in the asylums were not fed much at all either in the hospital that Bly was in. They usually had bread, prunes, and a bowl of tea. Nellie says that the food was awful and unbearable to eat, “My bowl of tea was all that I had left. I tasted, and one taste was enough. It had no sugar, and it tasted as if it had been made in copper. It was as weak as water. This was also transferred to a hungrier patient. (Bly). The fact that the patients were treated so poorly and were fed really bad and such little food is mind boggling. There are other accounts in other mental institutions that the patients were fed meals like this and were also sometimes only fed once a day. (Yetter). Some instances are even worse than Bly’s encounters, in some institutions like of the one Elizabeth Yetter discusses, people were completely starved to death. These accounts vary in the two different institution but they both show inhumane treatment of patients within the institutions. 

One of the most disturbing instances in the institutions would have to be the “drowning” like treatments/punishments. Nellie tells about her encounter with the drown experience, hers was not a treatment but hers occurred when she was being bathed and she felt like she was drowning. Bly uses specific imagery to explain the experience, “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 some of the sensation of a drowning person as they dragged me, gasping, shivering, and quaking, from the tub.” (Bly). Bly’s account may not have been an actual treatment per say but the way she was treated is still inhumane. In Elizabeth Yetter’s article she explains the “water cure” which basically means drowning. In Yetter’s article the “water cure” is so much worse than what Bly had to go through, “Poured water out of a pan onto their faces. The water was poured fast, and the pouring continued until the patient agreed to obey orders.” (Yetter). In this account the “water cure” is used as punishment, it’s not just rough handling like in Bly’s encounter. Just like with the starvation, these encounters of drowning are not exactly the same but they both deal with the same thing just in different variations and both involve inhumane treatments of patients. 

Does anyone like taking an ice bath? Not many people enjoy them, well in the asylums they would often has patients sit in them for hours or sometimes even days. Bly was forced to bath in ice cold water everyday. It is hard not to feel bad for her when she describes what she felt like, “My teeth chattered and my limbs were goose- fleshed and blue with cold.” (Bly). If this does not give the chills then what will? In Yetter's article she says this was called hydrotherapy. The institutions would use it as treatment for some of the patients, “Were meant as treatment for manic- depressive psychoses. The cold temperature would decrease the patient’s mental and physical activities and was never meant to be used as a form of punishment.” (Yetter). In the article by Alex Santoso he also talks about hydrotherapy and how the doctors actually thought that it would help the patients. In his article he describes how the patients would be in the hydrotherapy bath, “ One treatment involved mummifying the patient in towels soaked in ice-cold water.” (Santoso). Not that being in ice cold water is bad enough, imagine also being wrapped in cloth which would just make the patient feel even colder. The hydrotherapy is more consistent within these three occurrences. In all of these they are not meant to be punishment, but they are actually meant to help the patients. The doctors just did not know enough at the time and did not realize that they were treating the patients in a inhumane way. 

The treatment in insane asylums has completely changed over time. Now they are not called insane asylums, now they are called mental hospitals. When they were insane asylums the treatment was terrible as anyone can see after reading these three pieces. Nellie Bly’s work, Ten Days in a Mad House can be compared to the articles about treatment in insane asylums by Elizabeth Yetter and Alex Santoso because they all cover the same types of encounters, some are more extreme than others but they are all bad. Every encounter in all three works are all considered inhumane treatment of people. 
