Ten Days in a Madhouse by Nellie Bly

society, culture, personal, journals, arts · EN-US

Long before Christiane Amanpour, Frances Fitzgerald and Martha Gellhorn blazed a trail in courageous investigative journalism, a pioneering and intrepid writer and journalist whose pen name was Nellie Bly opened up a whole new field in what had previously been a strictly male domain.Ten Days in a Madhouse was published as a series of articles in the New York World during 1887. Nellie Bly was given the assignment by her editor to have herself committed to an insane asylum in New York with a “view to writing a plain and unvarnished narrative of the treatment of patients therein and the methods of management...” She was to feign insanity and get herself legally declared insane, pass the test conducted by the doctors and get committed. She was to chronicle her experiences and write a report that revealed everything that she went through in the asylum. It was not an easy decision to make and Nellie herself had doubts about the fact that once she was declared insane, her editors would hard