In the late 1880s, the reporter Nellie Bly faked her way into an asylum on Blackwell’s Island, in New York’s East River. (The native Lenape people knew the landmass as Minnehanonck, and it was renamed Roosevelt Island in the 1970s.) On assignment for the New York World newspaper, Bly, who was born Elizabeth Cochran Seaman and became one of America’s earliest and most intrepid female investigative journalists, reported on the people who were housed there by playing a patient herself. Bly’s harrowing account was titled “Ten Days in a Mad-House,”…
