While watching Silence Of The Lambs over the Halloween period I started thinking about the dinghy portrayal of damp asylum basements portrayed in films reserved for the most heinously psychotic members of public that didn’t manage to land a job in corporate upper management. I assumed the inspiration must have stemmed from the real asylums of the late 1800s where they stuck anyone caught screaming weather reports at pigeons or wanking too much. In my search I came across a particularly remarkable woman called Nellie Bly. This is the tale of the woman who got up to her ovaries in the stinking broth of a Victorian asylum to expose the horror that they contained.
Nellie Bly was born in 1864 and although I refer to her with her pen name her real name was Elizabeth Seaman. She was an American journalist and a pretty fucking bad ass one at that. She got her start in journalism after responding to a bullshit article in her local paper that said women were just baby machines, she of course took offence and the editor was so impressed at her eloquently written “fuck you” that he offered her a job. For her greatest move (potentially, she did something else pretty amazing I’ll get to later) she essential created a whole new form of investigative journalism by pulling off some real Sacha Baron Cohen shit going undercover, having herself declared insane and having a court send her to an insane asylum to see what the fuck was going on there. Her book she wrote from this entitled “Ten Days In A Mad House” which detailed the horrific conditions that she witnessed first hand was of course a success. If someone did that today I’d sure as fuck read it!
So… how did you go about getting yourself declared mad as a women in Victorian times? Well that’s easy, she simply booked herself in to a boarding house (that’s an old school AirBnB) and told the owners that she thought they were crazy and didn’t want to go to sleep. Boom. She was in an asylum faster than you can say “The government are using tiny satellite dishes in my teeth to find out what toothpaste I use”. Several doctors assessed her and declared her “undoubtedly insane” noting a “wild haunted look in her eyes”. Once she was in the asylum she was acting normal again which they then described her normal behaviour as symptoms of her mental illness, even when she pleaded to be released they said it was a sign of her madness. So she was pretty well fucked at this point.
They would beat anyone who wasn’t playing ball and if they became too wild they would tie the particularly mental patients together which even in those times they must have realised it was a bad idea to create some sort of mentally unstable rat king (Google ‘rat king’, the pictures are far more disturbing than any description I could make). They fed the patients with gruel and rotten beef, which normally people would only eat rotten meat from a kebab shop at 3am. One of the most horrific and sadly expected parts of the story was that she soon realised that many of the women in the asylum with her were just as sane as she was. Fortunately she had the foresight to arrange with a well known newspaper to spring her after 10 days which she was pretty stoked about, but obviously gutted that so many sane women were essentially stuck there being tortured. However this all led to a court case that made the requirement of mental assessments to be more thorough and produced a big government investment in these kind of institutions.
This wasn’t just a 15 minutes of fame for Nellie either, what is potentially more impressive is that she pulled a leaf out of Jules Verne’s novel and did a trip around the world in only 72 days! She travelled alone for the vast majority of the journey and managed to set a world record for fastest circumnavigation of the globe. Just for the whip cream and cherry on top, she actually met Jules Verne while going through France and for some fucking reason bought a monkey in Singapore… because, well why the fuck not.
Leonardo Gavinci 