Ten Days in A Mad-House and Other Stories (Annotated): This Edition Includes Nellie Bly's Articles Nellie Bly In Jail, In the Greatest New York Tenement, and In Trinity's Tenements Paperback

This exposed the insane asylum of New York!

This is not a book in the traditional sense, published by a publishing house. It is a collection of stories/articles/pictures which can be found online that have been collected together, printed and bound by Amazon. The front/back cover material is very thin and started to curl after 1 day, the pages feel thin.As it was not printed by a professional publishing house, it cannot be used for academic referencing/quotation - this was why I bought it. It's OK if you don't mind that, but I think it's misleading that this is not pointed out in the description.

This is a historic document made available to 21st Century readers.Nellie Bly made her name a household word by investigating controversial issues personally. In this instance she managed to get herself committed to an insane asylum. She subsequently wrote articles about her experiences and managed to effect change in the care and treatment of mental patients.7

This is a truly horrifying yet compelling story by journalist, Nelly Bly, who was hired by Joseph Pulitzer to feign insanity and report on her stay in Blackwell's Island Insane Asylum in 1887. The patients were treated as though they were not human and medical care was non-existent. Starved, beaten, tortured, these women were at the mercy of the staff with no way out. Lucky for Nelly, Pulitzer got her out and her subsequent stories of the nightmares she witnessed helped to shutter the asylum in 1894. "The insane asylum on Blackwell's Island is a human rat-trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out."

In addition to Ms. Bly's famous investigation of New York's insane asylum on Blackwell Island, this book contains exposes of various other NY industries affecting the employment and living conditions of the working poor in the mid-to-late 1890s. For me, personally, I found the most disturbing portrait to be that of the tenement industry. And more disturbing, is the plain fact that such horrible conditions continue to plague the (arguably) greatest country on earth.