"The insane asylum on Blackwell's Island is a human rat-trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out." Twenty-three-year-old journalist Nellie Bly, describing New York City's most notorious mental institution, wrote those words in 1887 after getting herself committed to the asylum. What she found was worse than anyone imagined: spoiled food, freezing baths, brutal attendants, and sane women locked away and forgotten alongside the truly ill. After her release she wrote a shocking expose called Ten Days in a Madhouse, launching her career as a world-famous investigative reporter and helping to improve conditions at mental institutions across the United States. Her story is as remarkable today as it was shen she wrote it. Fearless, unflinching, and told with a reporter's eye for damning detail, it remains a landmark of American journalism-and a searing reminder of what one determined woman can accomplish.