In the passage, Dr. Howard Markel strategically unfolds the events of Nellie Bly's groundbreaking investigation by first establishing her identity and significance as a pioneering journalist. He transitions into her infamous commitment to the New York City Lunatic Asylum, detailing the ease with which she was deemed insane after adopting a disguise and feigning madness. Markel then intricately connects her firsthand experiences within the asylum to the systemic abuses of mental health care, emphasizing both her astute observations and the broader implications of her findings on the treatment of the mentally ill. The narrative culminates with the societal impact of her exposé, highlighting the swift changes enacted by the municipal government in response to her revelations, thereby illustrating the power of investigative journalism in effecting social reform. Through this structure, Markel not only chronicles Bly's journey but also underscores the profound consequences of her audacious endeavor.
"Nelly Bly Undercover" by Dr. Howard Markel Today, we celebrate the 154th birthday of Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman. Better known by her nom de plume Nellie Bly (taken–and misspelled–from the title of a Stephen Foster tune, “Nelly Bly”), she was the pioneering, if not the very first, American investigative journalist. Bly was born in Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburgh. In 1889, she made a famous, widely reported and intrepid 72-day trip around the globe. It was the fastest journey of her era and one that shattered the fictional record of Jules Verne’s wanderer, Phineas Fogg, in his novel “Around the World in 80 Days.” Medical historians and patient advocates, however, rightly revere Bly for her infamous exposé of the New York City Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island in the East River. First reported in October 1887 on the pages of Joseph Pulitzer’s flagship newspaper, the New York World, Bly subsequently published her daring dispatches as a book, “Ten Days in a Mad-House.” It is a slim volume that remains a classic in the annals of psychiatry and a cogent warning against inhumane treatment of the mentally ill. It proved so embarrassing to the city aldermen that they appropriated an extra “$1,000,000 per annum” to correct many of the abuses Bly exposed.The fascinating question to answer, of course, is how did she do it? After talking her way into the city room of the New York World, she impressed the editors there enough to leave with a plum assignment: “I was asked by the World if I could have myself committed to one of the asylums for the insane in New York, with a view to writing a plain and unvarnished narrative of the treatment of the patients therein.”Getting committed proved rather easy, even if neither Bly nor her editors had a clear plan of getting her released once the story was filed. She took a room at a cheap boarding house, “Temporary Home for Females, No. 84 Second Avenue,” under the name Bly Brown and began questioning and imitating the women who seemed most insane to her. Soon enough, it was Bly who was deemed crazy. The matron of the house enlisted a few cops to escort Bly to the Essex Market Police Courtroom, where an impatient judge named Duffy pronounced her insane and ordered her to the famed insane ward at Bellevue Hospital, the city’s largest charitable hospital. A few days later, she boarded a ferry boat filled stem to stern with unwashed and uncomprehending women for Blackwell’s Island, “an insane place,” one ambulance driver told her, “where you’ll never get out of.” Taking careful notes of both her own experiences and those of her fellow inmates, Bly painted a dire picture in which 16 doctors were assigned to the care of some 1,600 inmates. “Excepting two,” she recorded, “I have never seen them pay any attention to the patients.” She also questioned the judge’s ability to pronounce a woman insane “by merely bidding her good morning and refusing to hear her pleas of release? Even the sick ones know it is useless to say anything for the answer will be that it is their imagination.” She also reported on the cultural insensitivity and language barriers experienced by immigrant women who spoke little or no English and a host of hostile and abusive treatments, from mandatory cold baths to confinement in small, damp, vermin-infested, locked rooms.After a few days on Blackwell’s Island, Bly dropped her act of “acting crazy” and tried to present herself in a more fit mental state. Such efforts were all for naught until the New York World sent an attorney to arrange for her release. Two days later, on Sunday, Oct. 9, 1887, the World ran the first installment of her story, titled “Behind Asylum Bars,” and Bly became an overnight sensation. The psychiatrists who had erroneously diagnosed her as insane offered profuse apologies, even as the remaining stories were widely syndicated across the nation. Not only did the New York City municipal government appropriate more money to the care of the mentally ill on Blackwell’s Island, a grand jury was impaneled to investigate the abuses and poor treatments Bly uncovered at the asylum. Approximately one month after her articles ran in print, many of the most glaring problems she reported had improved: better living and sanitary conditions were instituted, more nourishing meals were provided, translators were hired for the foreign born who were not necessarily mentally ill but simply could not understand their keepers, and the most abusive nurses and physicians were fired and replaced.Use the passage to answer the question. Write 4–5 sentences in which you analyze how the author unfolds and makes connections among the series of events in the passage.
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