"...I turned my attention to the prunes and
found that very few of them would be sufficient. A patient near asked me to
give them to her. I did so. My bowl of tea was all that was left. I tasted, and
one taste was enough. It had no sugar, and it tasted as if it had been made in
copper. It was as weak as water. This was also transferred to a hungrier
patient, in spite of the protest of Miss Neville. 'You must force the food
down,' she said, 'else you will be sick, and who knows but what, with these
surroundings, you may go crazy. To have a good brain the stomach must be cared
for.' 'It is impossible for me to eat that stuff,' I replied, and, despite all
her urging, I ate nothing that night."
Nellie
Bly, Ten Days in a Mad-House (New York City: Ian L. Munro, 1887)
This excerpt comes from one of
Nellie Bly’s recounts of her time in the asylum. Nellie was given the
assignment to observe the conditions in a major New York mental institution and
to publish her observations through an American press outlet for the public. Nellie
was a journalist who devoted herself to working on projects that only pertained
to subjects she was passionate about. She typically wrote only in regards to
the women’s rights movements, but when this aspect of society that was also
responsible for oppressing people and giving them unfair treatment was brought
to her attention, she eagerly took on the assignment. I consider this source to
be very trustworthy because it was written by Nellie herself during her time in
the asylum. I drew this specific excerpt from a page on pbs pbs.org.
Nellie’s findings were published in 1887, 19 years after Elizabeth Parsons’ The Prisoners' Hidden Life and 44 years after Dorothea Dix’s Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts .
Because she was published after these two widely known works, the public knew
that the conditions in the mental institutions were not at the level they
should be. But Nellie took a different view on things. Unlike Parson and Dix,
who entered the asylums as journalists, Nellie checked herself in as a mental
patient. Under the name “Nellie Brown”, Bly convinced an array of people that
she had lost her mind, which led to her confinement on Blackwell’s Island for
ten days. Because Nellie was a patient and received the treatment that all
other patients were given, she could fully immerse herself in what she was
informing the public of and could provide her readers with complete and
accurate information. Nellie was writing to show that the institutions these
ill people were put in were far from being beneficial for their health. She
says that the food was so unappealing that she chose to continue on hungry than
to force it down. An onlooker told her, “to have a good brain the stomach must
be cared for”. The food given to these patients was far from nutritious, and
wouldn’t fulfill the caring that needs to be done to the stomach in order to
have a “good brain”, even if Nellie had been able to make herself consume it. Nellie’s
entries effectively show that these asylums offered no help to the ailing and
if there is to be any improvement made to their health, better conditions need
to be implemented.
