Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock—the hands of the old wall clock move inexorably. Hour by hour, day by day, as if time has any meaning here. The wooden benches are hard, the beds cold, the food is both. From afar, shrill screams duet with a out-of-tune piano—nothing new. In fact, nothing here is ever new or different. Only one event occasionally brings variety to the dreary life: the arrival of poor souls who come until they leave again forever. Thus, the days flow into each other, indistinguishable, until even the seasons quietly change their places—here, on Blackwell Island.

Mad World

At the end of the 19th century, Blackwell Island in the heart of New York was known for its supposed "charity." Today called "Roosevelt Island," standing shoulder to shoulder with the Empire State Building and Central Park, the roughly 60-hectare island once housed Manhattan's societal outcasts—the sick, the poor, and the insane.

This isolation of the suffering, also known from the numerous tuberculosis sanatoriums in Europe, was largely due to the medical ignorance of the time. Logically, if one cannot combat a disease, the next best thing is to limit its spread. To provide a rough context of the prevailing knowledge: Louis Pasteur's germ theory was already being discussed but had not yet established itself in the general public's consciousness.

However, what did reach the public over time were rumors about the conditions on Blackwell Island.

These rumors were confirmed in 1887 by reporter Elizabeth Jane Cochran—better known by her pen name, Nellie Bly—who had herself committed to the Insane Asylum for ten days as part of an undercover investigation for the newspaper World. The resulting exposé, "Ten Days in a Madhouse," not only improved the regulations of the asylum but also set new journalistic standards.

Simply put, what A.C. Doyle is to detective stories, Nellie Bly is to investigative journalism.

Temporary home

Before her debut on the stage of the world, Nellie Bly meticulously practiced her role as a "madwoman." Her costume consisted of the most tattered, oldest, and dirtiest clothes that a young woman of the world might possess. With a hot bath, she bid farewell to the comforts of the upper middle class and entered one of the many lodges in the city, the Temporary Home for Females, located at No. 84 Second Avenue. Apart from 70 cents (equivalent to about 20 euros today), Bly was armed only with the typical tools of a reporter: a notebook, a pen, and an exceptional power of observation.

There she soon attracted the desired attention with her strange behavior. A slightly confused answer here and a pensive expression there were enough to frighten her fellow residents in the lodge. After a sleepless night—both voluntarily for Nellie Brown and involuntarily for a woman who feared Nellie would stab her with a knife—Nellie Brown was quietly taken away by the police on suspicion of insanity and presented to a judge.

Before the court & in Bellevue

To Nellie Brown's dismay, her judge was a remarkably kind man who attributed her distractedness more to a drug-induced stupor and feared she had been kidnapped. Consequently, he set out to find relatives who could care for the seemingly unaccountable woman. To this end, he wanted to present Nellie to shrewd journalists, who, fortunately for her, were not present at the time. Nellie was more afraid of being exposed in front of her colleagues than in front of any doctor or judge.

After Nellie Brown was examined on-site by a doctor, a carriage took her to the Insane Pavilion of Bellevue Hospital. There, she got a taste of what was to come.

The requests of sometimes healthy patients? – Rejected by doctors.

The food? – Inedible and insufficient.

The beds and rooms – Poorly equipped, uncomfortable, and bitterly cold.

After a few days in Bellevue, six female patients from the Insane Pavilion, including Nellie Brown, were loaded onto a boat. With the crossing of the East Side River, the patients became inmates.

Arrival at the Lunatic Asylum

As a welcome, the six women were presented with a true feast: thin, cold tea with a thick slice of bread smeared with inedible butter, complemented by a saucer holding five plums. The latter were immediately devoured by one of Brown’s fellow patients. She also distributed the rest of her meal among the others. The ambiance was similarly delightful: long, narrow wooden benches, on which women piled up like chickens on a perch.

The second stop for the newcomers was the bathroom. While other patients watched what lay ahead for them, the reporter was stripped of her clothes and placed in a tub filled with dirty water. Then, she was rubbed down with soap from head to toe and scrubbed roughly. This procedure was crowned with three buckets of ice-cold water, which were poured over her without warning. All of this was done against her will and under the threat of violence if she did not cooperate. Soon, she would learn that the former held little meaning on Blackwell Island anyway.

Wrapped in a wet piece of cloth and with dripping hair, Nellie Brown was taken to her room. Did they have a nightgown for her? No such luck. The blanket made of scratchy black wool, which didn’t even reach her feet, provided no more comfort in the barren room. Lastly, the nightly patrol of the nurses, who unceremoniously opened the iron doors of each patient room and closed them with a groan, made it impossible for Nellie to find the comforting sleep she so desperately sought.

As she waited, cold and shivering, through the frosty September night, a new, terrifying thought struck her: if a fire broke out, it would be impossible to unlock all the doors individually to allow the women inside to escape.

She had witnessed with her own eyes how horrifically the nurses had treated the patients so far and thus hardly believed that a heroic rescue operation could be expected from them.

Like so many other complaints that Nellie Bly directed at the nurses and doctors during her stay on Blackwell Island, this one was also ignored with a clear conscience—after all, one could hardly expect a single sensible thought from a madwoman.

An average day

The day in the Lunatic Asylum began at 5:30 AM. The women were presented with the asylum's clothing, which they often wore for several weeks. The windows were thrown open to allow even more cold air to further bind sick patients to their beds. In the bathroom, the women’s hair was roughly combed. Personal items like hairpins and combs were promptly taken from them.

At 7:15 AM, they went to the dining hall, where the tradition of the evening meal continued; tea that hardly deserved its name, bread with inedible butter, and a small side dish—oatmeal with molasses. When Nellie asked for a slice without butter, she beheld the bread in all its glory—complete with spider carcasses.

Afterwards, the women were taken to the "sitting room," where they spent most of their day—the true torture of the Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell Island. In this room, the women were forced to spend the majority of their day sitting and without any engagement. Only a piano could be found in some of the rooms, where the women were allowed to play and sing, but standing up or walking, as well as engaging in stimulating activities like painting or reading, were prohibited. A violation of these rules was punished—sometimes even with physical violence from certain nurses. Therefore, Nellie had her notebook and pencil taken away, which she used to record her observations. She eventually received the notebook back from a kind doctor, but the pencil was still denied to her—they insisted she had never possessed one;

Thus, there were exactly three distractions (visits excluded, as they were so rare) that the patients in the asylum would look forward to for the rest of their lives: a summons to one of the doctors, the meals, and the housework. For, as Nellie learned, tasks like sweeping, making beds, or washing were not done by the nurses but by the patients themselves.

And so the days went by: wake up - breakfast - boredom - dinner - sleep.

Report of Miss Cotter

Above all, the statements made by Miss Cotter to the journalist, which the latter could corroborate with various injuries, provide a grim insight into the abuse of the patients.

"The memory of it would be enough to drive me insane. For crying, the nurses beat me with a broom handle and jumped on me [...] Then they bound my hands and feet together and threw a sheet over my head, twisting it tightly around my neck so that I could no longer scream and shoved me into a bathtub filled with cold water. They held me down until I gave up and lost consciousness. On another occasion, they grabbed my ears and slammed my head against the door and the wall. Then they pulled my hair out by the roots [...] .

Nellie Bly's personal experience also aligns with such violence. One night, she was given a high-dose mixture of laudanum to take. When she refused, she was threatened with forced injection if she didn’t drink the mixture willingly. Eventually, Bly relented. As soon as she was alone again, she vomited on the floor.

Nellie Bly is free again

Unlike the film "10 Days in a Madhouse," released in 2015, Nellie Bly was released as agreed after 10 days and soon published her groundbreaking report, which you can read here.