Ten Days in a Mad-House and Other Stories by Nellie Bly Page A

always said it was the imagination of our diseased
    brains, and besides we would get another beating for telling. They
    would hold patients under the water and threaten to leave them to
    die there if they did not promise not to tell the doctors. We would all
    promise, because we knew the doctors would not help us, and we
    would do anything to escape the punishment. After breaking a
    window I was transferred to the Lodge, the worst place on the
    island. It is dreadfully dirty in there, and the stench is awful. In the
    summer the flies swarm the place. The food is worse than we get in
    other wards and we are given only tin plates. Instead of the bars
    being on the outside, as in this ward, they are on the inside. There
    are many quiet patients there who have been there for years, but the
    nurses keep them to do the work. Among other beating I got there,
    the nurses jumped on me once and broke two of my ribs.

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    “While I was there a pretty young girl was brought in. She had been
    sick, and she fought against being put in that dirty place. One night
    the nurses took her and, after beating her, they held her naked in a
    cold bath, then they threw her on her bed. When morning came the
    girl was dead. The doctors said she died of convulsions, and that
    was all that was done about it.
    “They inject so much morphine and chloral that the patients are
    made crazy. I have seen the patients wild for water from the effect of
    the drugs, and the nurses would refuse it to them. I have heard
    women beg for a whole night for one drop and it was not given
    them. I myself cried for water until my mouth was so parched and
    dry that I could not speak.”
    I saw the same thing myself in hall 7. The patients would beg for a
    drink before retiring, but the nurses–Miss Hart and the others–
    refused to unlock the bathroom that they might quench their thirst.

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    CHAPTER XV.
    INCIDENTS OF ASYLUM LIFE.
    THERE is little in the wards to help one pass the time. All the asylum
    clothing is made by the patients, but sewing does not employ one’s
    mind. After several months’ confinement the thoughts of the busy
    world grow faint, and all the poor prisoners can do is to sit and
    ponder over their hopeless fate. In the upper halls a good view is
    obtained of the passing boats and New York. Often I tried to picture
    to myself as I looked out between the bars to the lights faintly
    glimmering in the city, what my feelings would be if I had no one to
    obtain my release.
    I have watched patients stand and gaze longingly toward the city
    they in all likelihood will never enter again. It means liberty and life;
    it seems so near, and yet heaven is not further from hell.
    Do the women pine for home? Excepting the most violent cases, they
    are conscious that they are confined in an asylum. An only desire
    that never dies is the one for release, for home.
    One poor girl used to tell me every morning, “I dreamed of my
    mother last night. I think she may come to-day and take me home.”
    That one thought, that longing, is always present, yet she has been
    confined some four years.
    What a mysterious thing madness is. I have watched patients whose
    lips are forever sealed in a perpetual silence. They live, breathe, eat;
    the human form is there, but that something, which the body can live
    without, but which cannot exist without the body, was missing. I
    have wondered if behind those sealed lips there were dreams we ken
    not of, or if all was blank?
    Still, as sad are those cases when the patients are always conversing
    with invisible parties. I have seen them wholly unconscious of their
    surroundings and engrossed with an invisible being. Yet, strange to
    say, that any command issued to them is always obeyed, in about the

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    same manner as a dog obeys his master. One of the most pitiful
    delusions of any of the patients was that of a blue-eyed Irish girl,
    who believed she was forever