Through all this, Bly struggled to do the work that drew her there, pleading for the return of the pencil and notebook that had been in her purse, only to be told, “You can’t have it, so shut up.” When she asked again, a doctor told her she hadn’t brought a pencil and should strive to stop hallucinating. She stayed up late, trying to take in as much as she could, the whispers and shufflings of the asylum night. The nurses offered a narcotic to prompt sleep, and, when Bly refused it, they called the doctor who threatened to put it in her arm with a needle. Figuring once injected, the medicine would be in her blood for good, Bly drank it, but forced herself to throw up as soon as the staff left.
For Mayard, still not fully recovered, the unsalted and spoiled food, the cold baths, the inadequate clothing, took their toll. She grew steadily worse. One day, when they sat together on a bench, Mayard started shivering violently, then collapsed in what Bly referred to as a “fit.” When the superintendent came in, Bly reported, “He caught her roughly between the eyebrows or thereabouts, and pinched until her face was crimson.” Mayard was never the same.
After ten days, the lawyer from the World showed up, asking for the confounding Nellie Brown. Relatives were willing to take over her care, he told the asylum. Fetched from a walk with other inmates, pulled from the line and led through the grounds, Bly said an abrupt “goodbye” to those around her, and was free.
The departure of the sad girl from Cuba left the other papers in suspense. What was her story? How did all these strange parts add up? They would soon find out. The first installment of Bly’s asylum exposé splashed across the World’s front page days later.
Bly worked fast. Rescued on October 4, she published the first of two Blackwell’s articles on October 9, under the headline “Behind Asylum Bars.” Illustrations of Bly, practicing insane faces in a mirror, standing before the judge, being grilled by the doctor, decorated the columns. Over the course of the lengthy piece (the two parts together spanned almost thirty thousand words), she wrote about the freezing cold, the inedible food, the cruel treatment of the prisoners, and the way the facility was completely incapable of telling who was sane or not. It was desperate for reform. At the end of the first installment appeared the signature “Nellie Bly.” In the second installment, “Inside the Madhouse,” published October 16, Bly’s name moved to the subhead: “Nellie Bly’s Experience in the Blackwell’s Insane Asylum.” This was quite a coup for a new reporter.
The tale of the pretty girl with amnesia had been compelling, but the tale of the young woman who faked her way into the asylum was explosive. Sun reporters scrambled to catch up, interviewing doctors, nurses, and others who had encountered Nellie Brown. They were writing about Bly writing about her asylum experience. Bly was so popular with readers that within a few weeks, the World highlighted her name in their promotion of upcoming issues. Her story crept into other advertisements, too. Under the headline “Can Doctors Tell Insanity?” and the subhead “Experience of the World’s Reporter, Nellie Bly, Would Indicate Not,” an ad for “Dr. Green’s Nervura Nerve Tonic” offered to “restore tone, vigor, and vitality to the brain, rebuild and restore lost nerve force and power, and renew the strength and energies of the whole system.”
From its epicenter in New York, the asylum exposé rippled outward. The rise of syndication and news transmission by telegraph meant the story stirred readers on San Francisco streetcars and benches in Tennessee. The Salt Lake Herald declared the articles had set “New York wild with excitement,” and added, “It’s a tale far more interesting than a romance.” The Hazel Green Herald, out of Kentucky, reprinted an article under the headline “Smarter Than All of Them,” that crowed, “The police, the Court, the nurses and physicians at the famous Bellevue Hospital, were all successfully duped by a mere girl.” The Ohio Democrat concluded, “Miss Bly has undoubtedly performed a great work for the cause of humanity.” The Iola Register reprinted a column that took Bly’s performance as evidence for the competence of women. The whole piece was a rebuttal to the editors who told Bly women were only good for twittering about ball gowns. After recounting the stunt that “made a sensation from Maine to Georgia,” the writer concluded, “There is no reason whatever, there can be no argument whatever, against girls working on newspapers.”
And if praise and fame weren’t enough, her articles had real-world effects. Bly testified before a grand jury, an experience she found gratifying: “I answered the summons with pleasure, because I longed to help those of God’s most unfortunate children whom I had left prisoners behind me. If I could not bring them that boon of all boons, liberty, I hoped at least to influence others to make life more bearable for them.” She also went along on an inspection of asylum facilities. To Bly’s disgust, inspectors found better food, barrels of salt in the kitchen, polite nurses, and few of the patients she’d deemed mistakenly imprisoned. The institution had clearly prepared for their arrival. And Tillie Mayard? “I shuddered when I looked at her,” Bly wrote. She seemed to have become genuinely insane.
Even so, the grand jury recommended the asylum hire at least three female doctors, install prison-style locks that could open with one motion, and receive increased funds. The Board
