The Woman Who Exposed The Horrors of an Asylum
A late 19th-century pioneer of mental health reform
“It is only after one is in trouble that one realizes how little sympathy and kindness there are in the world.” — Nellie Bly, Ten Days in a Mad-House
I previously wrote about how a woman traveled around the world in 72 days — Elizabeth Jane Cochran, also known as Nellie Bly, her pen name. She would later take on the name of her husband, Robert Seaman, and be named Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman. But not only did Nellie Bly have a record-breaking feat of traveling around the world, but she also spent 10 days in an asylum to reveal the brutality and neglect with which patients were treated.
As someone who really respects good and novel reporting, Nellie Bly is an inspiration, and as a woman, Nellie Bly provided a model for other women going into journalism to achieve the highest level of reporting, according to her biographer, Brooke Kroeger:
“Her two-part series in October 1887 was a sensation, effectively launching the decade of ‘stunt’ or ‘detective’ reporting, a clear precursor to investigative journalism.”
Background
The story behind how Nellie Bly was assigned the asylum story was that she left her old newspaper, the Pittsburgh Dispatch. Bly went…
