Ten Days in a Mad-House

This book, a reprint of an 1887 work compiled by Ian Munro from the reports and news-clippings from intrepid journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochran, a.k.a. Nellie Bly - or for the sake of her narration in here, N. Brown. I won't say much about it because Wikipedia can give you a better-sourced summation than I can be bothered to - but basically she feigned dementia/insanity for a while to see how hard it would be to get committed to an asylum, in which pursuit she could then report first-hand on the conditions of such places. She spent ten days in Blackwell's Island Asylum, having been processed through the bulk of an inept bureaucratic system up to that point. It is gross and shocking reading that makes me so grateful to God for the NHS; and to the sheer ballsiness of people like Liz Cochran / Nellie Bly for diving headlong into the messes of our world to tell the truth, and their stories amidships. Grimly fascinating, and I will be digging out more books by Nellie to see how she managed to circumnavigate the world in eight days less than Jules Verne thought probable. Following her exposé of the terrible conditions, the state of New York committed an extra $1,000,000 to the cause of properly caring for the "insane". What a woman.