Dorothea Dix

Dorothea Dix вЂ" One of the Great Women of the 1800s

Once in a while a truly exceptional person has made a mark on the growth of mankind. Dorothea Dix was an exceptional woman. She wrote children’s books, she was a school teacher, and she helped reform in prisons. Some of her most notable work was in the field of making mental health institutions a better place for the patients that lived in them. Dorothea Dix gave a great deal to humanity and her achievements are still being felt today, especially in the treatment of those with mental disabilities. Dix started out though with very humble beginnings.

Dorothea Dix was born in Hampden, Maine in 1802. Her mother was not very mentally stable and her dad was an abusive alcoholic. The Dix moved from Maine to Vermont just before the British War of 1812. Then, after the war they moved to Worcester, MA. While in Worcester, the Dix had two more children, both boys. The family would eventually break apart because of the mother’s mental state and the father’s drinking.1

Dorothea Dix and her two brothers ended up moving to Boston to live with their grandmother on their father’s side Dorothea Lynde, who was the wife of Dr Elijah Dix.2 Dix helped with the rearing of her brothers as she had done in her parents’ home. The grandmother tried to instill her Puritan ways of Boston’s wealthy into Dix’s mind. Grandmother Dix tried to turn young Dorothea into a nice proper girl from Boston, but that wasn’t in the cards for young Dix. The grandmother had given her dancing lessons and even her own private seamstress. Dix was not into this style of life and she would give some of her clothes away, and food to the poor; which had infuriated her grandmother. This angered the grandmother enough to send young Dix to live with the grandmother’s sister; her Aunt Duncan.3 Grandmother Dix had hoped this change might help. Dix remained there for a couple of years; she seemed to become well adjusted so she returned back to Boston to a new beginning in her life.

When she returned to Boston she asked her grandmother if she could start another school in her grandmother’s dining room. After a bit of opposition, her grandmother agreed. There, she taught until 1835, but she became sick with tuberculosis and also exhaustion had set in. Because of her illness she closed the school and then traveled to Europe to recuperate, under the advice of her friends and family. She again returns to Boston, months later, but this time she found herself with a very large inheritance that would allow her to love comfortably for the rest of her life.4

She realized that she was not the type to sit back and do nothing, so she accepted an invitation to teach at a Sunday school at the East Cambridge Jail in East Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1941. That’s when her quest began. She was shocked when she saw that mentally ill patients were being put into the jails, and even more appalled at the conditions they were put in. This is where Dix helped humanity in a giant way. She made it public about the ways that those with mental and physical handicaps were being treated. Dix wrote, “Men need knowledge in order to overpower their passions and master their prejudices.”5

She first appealed to the local courts and though the conditions were mildly improved she was not satisfied with the outcomes. She traveled the state of Massachusetts for two years, documenting the conditions that she found. Dix, and with the help of a member of the Massachusetts State Legislature, Samuel Gridley Howe, she presented her reports from her visits to the jails, work houses, and hospitals in January of 1843.6

The Massachusetts Legislature had ignored her requests for better conditions and funding. Some of the assemblymen thought that it was too expensive. Even though there were financially based arguments with the Legislature, she was at a loss because she was still just a woman fighting for a cause in a “man’s” world. People were also of the belief that the mentally insane were being punished by God, and that they deserved the treatment they were receiving.7 Finally, a member of the Legislation went to personally examine the conditions at one of the hospitals, and reported the conditions as even worse than what Dorothea Dix described them. The Legislature ended up passing a bill that separated the mentally ill from the criminals, and also gave them better living conditions. $200,000 was also authorized for the building of a new facility in East Cambridge.8

Dix traveled the US for a three year period, she visited and documented various conditions and pleaded with the state governments to better those institutions that were not up to par. While she was on tour of the jails, hospitals, etc. she saw many of the sick that were being abused or not being taken care of emotionally or physically. She continued with her fight to help those in need. Her work inspired the creation of a school for the blind and she also persuaded nine southern states to set up public hospitals for the insane. She eventually became tired of her state to state driving and went to the Federal Government and asked for10 million acres to be used by the insane, deaf, and dumb. The bill was passed in February of 1851 by the Senate.9 Even though it passed through Congress it was vetoed by President Pierce.

Dix then started volunteering as a nurse for the Union army after the attack on Fort Sumter and she was placed in charge of all the women nurses working in Army hospitals at the time of the Civil War. She became the Union Superintendent of female nurses during the Civil War. She court marshaled every doctor she found drunk or disorderly. She often had battles with the military bureaucracy and occasionally ignored administrative details, the office and red tape