were immigrants who didn’t understand English and seemed to have been mistakenly committed to the
island. Others were just poor and thought they were going to a poorhouse, not an insane asylum, she wrote.
All related horrible stories of neglect and heartless cruelty.
Mrs Cotter, “a pretty, delicate woman”, told Bly that, “for crying, the nurses beat me with a broom-handle
and jumped on me, injuring me internally, so that I shall never get over it”. She said the nurse then tied her
hands and feet, threw a sheet over her head to muffle her screams and put her in a bathtub of cold water.
“They held me under until I gave up every hope and became senseless.”
“The beatings I got there were something dreadful,” Bridget McGuinness told Bly. “I was pulled around by
the hair, held under the water until I strangled, and I was choked and kicked ... It was hopeless to complain
to the doctors, for they always said it was the imagination of our diseased brains, and besides we would get
another beating for telling.”
Charles Dickens also wrote about the asylum at
Blackwell’s Island (British Library)Nurses drugged inmates with “so much morphine and chloral that the patients are made crazy,” Bly
reported. “The attendants seemed to find amusement and pleasure in exciting the violent patients to do
their worst,” she wrote.
Exhausted and starving, Bly was relieved when, 10 days after her entry into the asylum, lawyers from the
New York World arranged for her release. Though sorry to leave the suffering women, Bly was eager to
write about what she had seen.
Two days later, on 9 October 1887, the New York World printed the first part of Bly’s two-part illustrated
series on the front page of the Sunday feature section. The blaring headlines of the second instalment
enticed readers: “Inside the Madhouse”; “Nelly Bly’s Experience in the Blackwell’s Island Asylum”; “How
the City’s Unfortunate Wards are Fed and Treated”; “The Terrors of Cold Baths and Cruel, Unsympathetic
Nurses”; according to Kroeger’s book.
Bly’s first-person account of abuse shocked the public. “Writers like Charles Dickens and Margaret Fuller
had toured insane asylums and written about them. But those were guided tours and they didn’t see much,”
Kroeger says.
“To succeed at feigning insanity and live to write about it was an extraordinary feat,” Kroeger writes in her
book. “As the achievement of a woman journalist in this period, its brilliance was blinding ... Fame is ignited
and spread fast and far.”
The story was so explosive that competing newspapers produced their own accounts of how Bly succeeded
in her dangerous work, just to join in on the exposé.