Dieci giorni in manicomio

Di Nellie Bly

QUESTO LIBRO È A LAYOUT FISSO

Nel 1887, la reporter Nellie Bly, fingendosi una rifugiata afflitta da paranoia, si fece rinchiudere nel manicomio dell’isola Blackwell, allo scopo di scoprire le condizioni di vita delle donne ricoverate.
“Battevo i denti e tremavo, il corpo livido per il freddo che attanagliava le mie membra. All’improvviso, tre secchi di acqua gelida mi furono versati sulla testa, tanto che ne ebbi gli occhi, la bocca e le narici invase. Quando, scossa da tremiti incontrollabili, pensavo che sarei affogata, mi trascinarono fuori dalla vasca. Fu in quel momento che mi sentii realmente prossima alla follia”.
Nel suo reportage, Nellie Bly racconta i soprusi e le violenze che le pazienti subivano per opera di crudeli infermiere e medici poco capaci.
“Prendi una donna perfettamente sana, rinchiudila in una stanza gelida e costringila a sedere dalle 6 del mattino alle 8 di sera, impedendole di muoversi e  di parlare, alimentala con pessimo cibo, senza mai darle notizie di ciò che accade nel resto del mondo e vedrai come, ben presto, la condurrai alla follia. Due mesi sono sufficienti a provocarle un vero e proprio esaurimento fisico e mentale”. 
Grazie al suo reportage, una commissione stanziò 1.000.000 di dollari per apportare una riforma degli istituti di igiene mentale.
Nellie Bly, pseudonimo di Elizabeth Jane Cochran (1864 – 1922) fu la prima giornalista investigativa. 

• Lingua: Italiano
• Editore: Edizioni Clandestine
• Data di uscita: 6 set 2017
• ISBN: 9788865967225

Nellie Bly

Nellie Bly (1864-1922) was an American investigative journalist. Born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she was raised in a family of Irish immigrants. In 1879, she attended Indiana Normal School for a year before returning to Pittsburgh, where she began writing anonymously for the Pittsburgh Dispatch. Impressed by her work, the newspaper’s editor offered her a full-time job. Writing under the pseudonym of Nellie Bly, she produced a series of groundbreaking investigative pieces on women factory workers before traveling to Mexico as a foreign correspondent, which led her to report on the arrest of a prominent Mexican journalist and dissident. Returning to America under threat of arrest, she soon left the Pittsburgh Dispatch to undertake a dangerous investigative assignment for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World on the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. After feigning a bout of psychosis in order to get admitted, she spent ten days at the asylum witnessing widespread abuse and neglect. Her two-part series in the New York World later became the book Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887), earning Bly her reputation as a pioneering reporter and leading to widespread reform. The following year, Bly took an assignment aimed at recreating the journey described in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Boarding a steamer in Hoboken, she began a seventy-two day trip around the globe, setting off a popular trend that would be emulated by countless adventurers over the next several decades. After publishing her book on the journey, Around the World in Seventy-Two Days (1890), Bly married manufacturer Robert Seaman, whose death in 1904 left Bly in charge of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Co. Despite Bly’s best efforts as a manager and inventor, her tenure ultimately resulted in the company’s bankruptcy. In the final years of her life, she continued working as a reporter covering World War I and the women’s suffrage movement, cementing her legacy as a groundbreaking and ambitious figure in American journalism.

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