Being sent to an insane asylum in the late 19th century was a tragic sentence, especially for women. Imagine purposefully trying to get committed to one as a woman of a totally sound mind.

That’s exactly what 23-year-old journalist Nellie Bly did in 1887. She’d been hired by Joseph Pulitzer (yes, that Pulitzer) at the New York World, and one of her first assignments was a doozy. She was asked to go undercover as a patient at New York City Lunatic Asylum and report on what she experienced there, which meant she had to convince enough experts and authorities that she was clinically insane.

She didn’t intend to write a scathing exposé

The undercover assignment wasn’t meant to be a “gotcha.” Bly explained in Ten Days in a Mad-House that the goal was to “write a plain and unvarnished narrative of the treatment of the patients therein and the methods of management, etc.” Her editor told her, “We do not ask you to go there for the purpose of making sensational revelations. Write up things as you find them, good or bad; give praise or blame as you think best, and the truth all the time.”

In hindsight, Bly’s courage in taking on this task may have been aided by a bit of naivete. “I had no idea that my experiences would contain aught else than a simple tale of life in an asylum,” she wrote. “That such an institution could be mismanaged, and that cruelties could exist ‘neath its roof, I did not deem possible.”

@history_with_amy At just 23 Nellie Bly pretended to be mad so that she could uncover the brutalities of a women’s asylum. #nelliebly #history #19thcentury ♬ original sound – Dr Amy Boyington

At just 23 Nellie Bly pretended to be mad so that she could uncover the brutalities of a women’s asylum. #nelliebly #history #19thcentury ♬ original sound – Dr Amy Boyington

Mostly, she went in with curiosity. She did worry a bit about how she would get out once she got in, however. When she asked her editor, he responded, “I do not know. But we will get you out if we have to tell who you are, and for what purpose........

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