Nellie Bly React

 

    Nellie Bly was among the most exciting people I learned from the EOTO. Her real name is not actually Nellie Bly; she was born Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, and Nellie Bly was just a pen name she used that was inspired by a Stephen Foster song.  The most interesting thing I learned about her was her covering of the Blackwell Asylum. There were reports of brutality at the asylum, but no one had investigated yet. So this is where Nellie Bly steps in; she decided to feign insanity at a women's boardinghouse, and while she was there, the boarders thought she was crazy, so they contacted the police and got her admitted to the Blackwell Asylum. Once in the asylum, she started to write about the conditions that many of the women there went through. Some of the things she wrote about were alarming, like the nurses beating the patients, food consisting of spoiled beef,  frigid bath water, rats all around, and patients being tied together. She also discovered that some of the patients there were just as sane as she was and were wrongly placed in the asylum. After Bly was released from the asylum, she wrote a series of articles that would eventually be turned into a book called Ten Days in a Mad House. This book had critical acclaim and helped change many fundamentals of the US asylum network.  Also, after the articles were published, many people wondered how Bly could be diagnosed as mentally ill so quickly. After that, the US ensured that future examinations were more in-depth and only the actual mentally ill were allowed into asylums. What also caught my eye was when she traveled the world for around 72 days; while she only held the record for a few months, it is still very impressive that she could do this in a hot air balloon. She was also much more than a journalist; she patented many inventions, with her most impactful being the 55-gallon oil drum still in use today. There are so much more barriers that this remarkable human being has accomplished. I encourage you to read the longer blog post I have linked about her above if you want to know more.