Ten Days in a Madhouse

Ryan Boquist

rating: 8-10

pages:90

The book I read starts off with the narrator, Nellie Bly in the office of Joseph Pulitzer. She works as a journalist for the New York World newspaper, and took an undercover assignment. She agreed to fake insanity to investigate troubling reports of brutality at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island.

After a night pretending to be insane in front of a mirror, she checked into a boarding house. There, she refused to go to bed, telling the boarders that she was afraid of them and that they looked crazy. They soon decided that she was crazy, and the next morning called the police. The police took Nellie to a courtroom, she pretended to have amnesia. The judge concluded that she had been drugged and was not insane. However being a good journalist Nellie could not let her mission end there. She was then examined by several doctors, who all declared her to be insane. The “highly experienced doctors” said she was demented and that she was hopeless. Therefore the doctors decided to put her in the Women’s Lunatic Asylum.

In the asylum Ms. Bly could get a firsthand view of what went on at Blackwell. The food consisted of gruel broth, spoiled beef, terribly stale bread and dirty undrinkable water. The dangerous patients were tied together with ropes. The patients were made to sit for much of each day on hard benches with minimal protection from the cold. Waste was all around the eating places. Rats crawled all around the hospital. The bathwater was frigid, and buckets of it were poured over their heads. The nurses were obnoxious and abusive, telling the patients to shut up, and beating them if they did not listen. Speaking with her fellow patients, Bly was convinced that some were as sane as she was and the asylum made them the way they were.

After ten days, Bly was released from the asylum. Her report was later published in a book as Ten Days in a Mad-House, the reports caused a sensation and brought her fame. The physicians and staff that admitted Nellie could not explain how they could have been fooled. After the reports came out about Blackwell a grand jury launched its own investigation of the asylum, inviting Bly to assist. After the investigation a call was made for an increase in funds for $850,000 in the budget of the Department of Public Charities and Corrections. They also made sure that all of the examinations were more thorough so that only people who were actually insane went to the asylum.

I recommend reading this book if you like reading about holocaust stories. The authors writing style is very compact and eye opening. Even though this is a short book this feels like reading a book twice its length and the author had a firsthand experience so it’s cool to read from that perspective too. All in all I recommend reading this book if you have not read it, it is a very eye opening book.