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Nellie Bly: Charles Dickens’ Visit to Blackwell’s Island Asylum 1842 – Part 4

Posted in Charles Dickens, Mental Institutions, Nellie Bly, PEOPLE, tagged biographies of journalists, biographies of women, Blackwell's Island, Charles Dickens, insane asylum, lunatic asylum, mental illness, Nellie Bly on January 3, 2009| 5 Comments »

One day, during my stay in New York, I paid a visit to the different public institutions on Long Island, or Rhode Island: I forget which. One of them is a Lunatic Asylum. The building is handsome; and is remarkable for a spacious and elegant staircase. The whole structure is not yet finished, but it is already one of considerable size and extent, and is capable of accommodating a very large number of patients.

I cannot say that I derived much comfort from the inspection of this charity.The different wards might have been cleaner and better ordered; I saw nothing of that salutary system which had impressed me so favourably elsewhere; and everything had a lounging, listless, madhouse air, which was very painful. The moping idiot, cowering down with long dishevelled hair; the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the gloomy picking of the hands and lips, and munching of the nails: there they were all, without disguise, in naked ugliness and horror. In the dining room, a bare, dull, dreary place, with nothing for the eye to rest on but the empty walls, a woman was locked up alone. She was bent, they told me, on committing suicide. If anything could have strengthened her in her resolution, it would certainly have been the insupportable monotony of such an existence. The terrible crowd with which these halls and galleries were filled, so shocked me, that I abridged my stay within the shortest limits, and declined to see that portion of the building in which the refractory and violent were under closer restraint.

I have no doubt that the gentleman who presided over this establishment at the time I write of, was competent to manage it, and had done all in his power to promote its usefulness: but will lit be believed that the miserable strife of Party feeling is carried even into this sad refuge of afflicted and degraded humanity? Will it be believed that the eyes which are to watch over and control the wanderings of minds on which the most dreadful visitation to which our nature is exposed has fallen, must wear the glasses of some wretched side in Politics? Will it be believed that the governor of such a house as this, is appointed, and deposed, and changed perpetually, as Parties fluctuate and vary, and as their despicable weathercocks are blown this way or that? A hundred times in every week, some new most paltry exhibition of that narrow-minded and injurious Party Spirit, which is the Simoom of America, sickening and blighting everything of wholesome life within its reach, was forced upon my notice; but I never turned my back upon it with feelings of such deep disgust and measureless contempt, as when I crossed the threshold of this madhouse.

http://nyc10044.com/timeln/dickens.html

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Nellie Bly – Part 3

Posted in Mental Institutions, Nellie Bly, PEOPLE, tagged biographies of women, biographies of women journalists, Nellie Bly arrested, Nellie Bly at Bellevue Hospital on January 3, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Nellie Bly could have won an Academy Award for her impersonation of a lunatic. On the morning of Saturday, September 24, 1887, within twenty-four hours of checking into the Temporary Home for Females at No. 84 Second Avenue, the police were called to escort “Nellie Brown” to the Essex police station. The assistant matron of the boardinghouse told the police that “Nellie Brown” had so terrified her female boarders with her crazy rantings that they feared being murdered in her beds. Bly claimed that all the women in the house were crazy. She had forgotten who she was, she said, and lost her trunks. She acted confused, vague, but not dangerous.
nellie-bly-in-the-hands-of-the-police1

The police took Bly before Judge Duffy who ordered her sent to Bellevue Hospital for examination, where Dr. William C. Braisted, head of the insane pavilion there, said Bly was “undoubtedly insane.” (1) There she passed two freezing cold nights, remembering that “all night long we were kept awake by the talk of the nurses and their heavy walking through the uncarpeted halls.” Nellie, being Nellie, complained to the nurses and the doctors about the lack of heat in the institution and the poor conditions. She was told that she could expect no kindness in the place as it was a charitable institution!

The stay at Bellevue was temporary though. The next day – Monday – a boat was expected. It would take Nellie Bly away permanently to Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum for Women.

Just think. The speed of the thing was dizzying. On Thursday Nellie Bly had been sitting in the offices of the New York World contemplating the assignment of posing as an insane woman to gain admittance into an institution. It seemed an impossible hurdle – to be declared insane and committed for life to an insane asylum. Yet it was a mere three days later and Nellie Bly – a completely normal person – was being committed for life to an insane asylum – on the notorious Blackwell’s Island. How many other unfortunates had also suffered this fate?

(1) Kroeger, Brooke. Nelly Bly. (New York: Random House, 1994)

Next: Nellie being Nellie

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Nellie Bly – Part 2

Posted in Mental Institutions, Nellie Bly, PEOPLE, tagged biographies of women, biographies of women journalists on January 2, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Nellie Bly accepted the assignment. The task was frightening – to get herself committed to an asylum, to live among the lunatics for a week or so, then to write an expose on the conditions there – and she was nervous. But not about her skills as a writer. Her knack for including the telling detail made her articles compelling reading. No, she was nervous because she did not think she could pull off convincing the doctors that she was insane.

Bly had never known a crazy person. Just how did a crazy person look, she wondered.

nellie-practices-insanity4 “So I flew to the mirror and examined my face,” she wrote later. “I remembered all I had read of the doings of crazy people, how first of all they have staring eyes, and so I opened mine as wide as possible and stared unblinkingly at my own reflection.” She began to sweat nervously, which unfortunately took the curl out of her Victorian bangs. Over and over again, she practiced her crazy face in the mirror. She ended up staying up all night, rehearsing her new role, thinking about her new mission, and reading scores of ghost stories to put her in a lunatic frame of mind.

When morning came, she bathed, bid her soap and toothbrush a fond farewell, and put on nondescript clothing. Then she went out into the street in search of a boarding house where she could begin her charade as the little lost and nutty Nellie Brown from Cuba.

Next: Inside the Madhouse

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Nellie Bly – Part 1

Posted in Mental Institutions, Nellie Bly, PEOPLE, tagged Blackwell's Island, Elizabeth Jane Cochran, insane asylum, mental illness, mentally ill, Nellie Bly on January 1, 2009| 4 Comments »

nellie-bly It had been four months since she’d left Pittsburgh for New York yet Elizabeth Jane Cochran, or “Nellie Bly,” as her byline read, still hadn’t landed a job as a newspaper reporter. She had left the Pittsburgh Dispatch because she was tired of being assigned to the ladies’ pages – writing the society column, reviewing operas, and reporting on the latest women’s fashions.

It was now September of 1887. Bly was running out of money – and then she lost her purse, losing the little bit of money she had left. “I was penniless,” she wrote later, yet she still was not willing to return her former position in Pittsburgh, an industrial city so ugly, said a writer for the Atlantic Monthly, that it was “like looking into hell with the lid off.” New York was the center of the publishing world, a world dominated by men, a fact not lost on Bly. She had to be clever, very clever, to convince a newspaper why they should hire her, a woman, and not a man.

So Bly made up a list of clever story ideas, sure to boost any newspaper’s circulation. Then she borrowed cabfare from her landlady and headed to Park Row, home to the city’s newspaper offices. She managed to talk her way into the office of the managing editor of the New York World Colonel John Cockerill. She took out her list of ideas. She offered to sail steerage class from Europe to America so she could report firsthand the experiences of an immigrant.

Cockerill didn’t like her idea, but he must have recognized Bly’s potential, because he proposed an even wilder assignment. Why didn’t Bly fake insanity, he asked, and get herself committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum? As an undercover agent, Bly could witness for herself and later report on the rumored abuses suffered by the inmates at the hands of a sadistic staff.

The notorious Women’s Lunatic Asylum was set on the 120-acre sliver of land called Blackwell’s Island in the East River. It was surrounded by prisons and charity institutions. If Bly accepted the assignment, she would be asking for trouble. It could be dangerous. Bly had never been around crazy people before. Could she pull it off? What if she got sent to Blackwell’s Island, got locked up in the asylum with a bunch of lunatics and couldn’t get out?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly

Kroeger, Brooke. Nellie Bly. (New York: Random House, 1994)

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/world/

Next: Nellie decides.

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The Lunatic Asylum

Posted in Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., Kennedys, the, Mental Institutions, PEOPLE, Rosemary Kennedy, tagged biographies of sick women, biographies of women, Kennedy family photos, mental illness and treatment, Rosemary Kennedy has a lobotomy, Texas State Lunatic Asylum on December 30, 2008| 11 Comments »

Releasing Lunatics from their Chains (Robert-fleury)

I was recalling something my grandmother told me about a “field trip” she and her sister Maurine took to Austin, Texas, back in the 1920’s. Both Grandmother and Aunt Maurine were young and single, living in Lufkin, Texas. They had heard all about the state lunatic asylum and wanted to see it for themselves. I think they were hoping to spot a flesh and blood lunatic. The trip was a real highlight.

The two took the train all alone from East Texas to Austin to visit the asylum.

“It’s lucky they weren’t captured,” says my sister Loise.

I’ve seen the maps of Austin from those days. The important buildings are marked, including the University of Texas, the State Capital, and the State Lunatic Asylum. True, the Lunatic Asylum was a garden spot and people other than my relatives were drawn to it for good reasons. But I think novels like Jane Eyre give us an insight into attitudes toward the mentally ill. They were weird, scary, and dangerous.

Evidently the Texas State Lunatic Asylum was ahead of its time in its compassionate approach toward the mentally ill. The asylum movement in America and Europe at that time “strived to provide a healthy diet, exercise, fresh air, adequate rest, a strict daily routine, social contact, and a kind but firm approach,” according to the website of the Texas Dept. of State Health Services (1). No longer flogging the patient or tossing cold water on him, the treatment for the mentally ill in the first half of the twentieth century was still far from humane.

Rosemary Kennedy

In 1941, Joseph Kennedy authorized a frontal lobotomy for his beautiful special needs daughter Rosemary, who was proving to be a bit of an embarrassment to him when she tripped curtseying to the Queen of England.

According to Dr. Watts, a surgeon assisting in the lobotomy of Rosemary Kennedy:

“We went through the top of the head, I think she was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer. I made a surgical incision in the brain through the skull. It was near the front. It was on both sides. We just made a small incision, no more than an inch.” The instrument Dr. Watts used looked like a butter knife. He swung it up and down to cut brain tissue. “We put an instrument inside,” he said. As Dr. Watts cut, Dr. Freeman put questions to Rosemary. For example, he asked her to recite the Lord’s Prayer or sing “God Bless America” or count backwards. … “We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded.” … When she began to become incoherent, they stopped.” (2)

1. http://www.dshs.state.tx.us/mhhospitals/AustinSH/ASH_About.shtm

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy

NEXT: Stunt reporter for THE NEW YORK WORLD Nellie Bly writes TEN DAYS IN A MAD-HOUSE