Dorothea Dix

The insane were regarded with fear and loathing, and it was not until the beginning of the 19th century that such men as Dr. Channing began to insist on the presence in human nature, even in its most degraded condition, of grains of good.

It was from Dr. Channing that Dorothea Lynd Dix drank in this theory with passionate faith, and proceeded at once to convert it into action.

She was governess of Dr. Channing's children, and had long been interested in bettering the condition of convicts.

But now her attention was turned to the insane, and she proceeded at once to master the whole question of insanity, its origin, its development, and its treatment, so far as it was then known.

Her statements were denounced as untrue and slanderous, but a little investigation proved their truth, and with such men behind her as Channing, Horace Mann, and Samuel G. Howe, it was soon apparent that something would be done.

The obstructions and delays of politicians were swept away before a steadily rising tide of public indignation, and a large appropriation was made by the legislature to provide proper quarters and proper treatment for insane persons.

So Miss Dix won her first great victory, the forerunner of similar ones in almost every state in the Union, for she traveled from state to state making the same investigations she had in Massachusetts, arousing public opinion and compelling legislature after legislature to make adequate provision for the insane.

The vastness of this campaign, which Miss Dix planned deliberately and which she carried through until she had visited every state east of the Rocky Mountains, gives evidence to her extraordinary character.

The war had erupted in 1861 over the issue of slavery following the election of the abolitionist Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States.

Within a short period of time, American troops were experiencing similar outcomes among their wounded and sick as the British had faced in Crimea, and Nightingale became a principal advisor to Dorothea Dix.

a nurse matron and coordinator of care in the Union Army Hospitals.

Through her, some of the expertise which had been acquired through the trauma of the Crimean War was imparted to Union nurses operating in North America ten years later.

She's seeing things that aren't there.

So they send her to Dorothea Dix, right? That's the only thing they can think of to do.

Now, later we would find out that she actually was dying of malnutrition, which is what caused all of these things to happen.

But

anyways...

After she passes at Dorothea Dix, they're just grieving, they're stricken, and her husband actually has an angel carved in her likeness.

If you look at pictures of her, they look very similar.

This angel looks like a real person.

That system produced the scientist who still represents American women in the mind of the world, Maria Mitchell, the only American woman whose name appears among the names of the world's great scholars inscribed on the Boston Public Library.

it produced dorothea dix who for twenty years before the civil war carried on perhaps the most remarkable investigation of conditions that has ever been made in this country by man or woman the one which required the most courage endurance and persistency her investigation of the then barbaric system for caring or not caring for the insane state after state enacted new laws and instituted new methods solely on the showing of this one woman if there were no other case to offer to the frequent cry that women have never had an influence on legislation this would be enough moreover this is but the most brilliant example of the kind of work women have been doing from the beginning of the republic to my mind there is no phase of their activities which reveals better the geniuses of their training than the initiative they took in founding schools of advanced grades for girls and in organizing primary and secondary schools on something like a national scale mary lyon's work for mount holyoke college and catherine beecher's for the american women's education association are the most substantial individual achievements though they are but types of what many women were doing and what women in general were backing up it was work of the highest constructive type original in its conception full of imagination and idealism rich in its capacity for growth a work to fit the aspiration of its day and so full of the future now when conditions are such that a few rise to great eminence from the ordinary ranks of life it means a good general average the multitude of women of rare achievements distinguishing the revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods of american history are the best evidences of the seriousness idealism and intelligence of the women in general Their services in the war are part of the traditions of every family whose line runs back to those days.

Loyal, spirited, ingenious, and uncomplaining, they are one of the finest proofs in history of the capacity of the women of the mass to respond wholeheartedly to noble ideals, one of its finest illustrations, too, of the type of service needed from women in great crises.

But the rank and file which conducted itself so honorably in the Revolution was not a whit more noble and intelligent than the rank and file of the succeeding period.

It is my hope that reiterating this message in every forum possible will someday touch the heart of that future leader.

who will become to this reform movement what Florence Nightingale was to the nursing profession, what Dorothea Dix became to the reform of institutions for the mentally ill.

If there is a single prayer to send up from the putrid mess above Cayuga's waters, imploring heaven for that future leader is it.

A Mary Lyon, demanding and making possible equal advantages of education for women as for men, and, in the face of discouragement and incredulity, bequeathing to women the opportunities of Holyoke.

A Dorothea Dix, insisting on the humane and rational treatment of the insane, and bringing about a reform in the lunatic asylums of the country, making a great step forward in the tender regard for the weak by the strong throughout the world.

A Helen Hunt Jackson, convicting the nation of a century of dishonor in regard to the Indian.

A Lucretia Mott, gentle Quaker spirit, with sweet insistence, preaching the abolition of slavery and the institution in its stead of the brotherhood of man, her life and words breathing out in tender melody the injunction: "Have love; Not love alone for one, But man as man thy brother call, And scatter, like the circling sun, Thy charities on all." And at the most trying time of what we have called the accumulative period, when internecine war, originated through man's love of gain and his determination to subordinate national interests and black men's rights alike to considerations of personal profit and loss, was drenching our country with its own best blood, who shall recount the name and fame of the women on both sides this senseless strife? Those uncomplaining souls with a great heartache of their own, rigid features and pallid cheek their ever effective flag of truce, on the battlefield, in the camp, in the hospital, binding up wounds, recording dying whispers for absent loved ones, with tearful eyes pointing to man's last refuge, giving the last earthly handclasp, and performing the last friendly office for strangers whom a great common sorrow had made kin, while they knew that somewhere, somewhere, a husband, a brother, a father, a son, was being tended by stranger hands, and mayhap those familiar eyes were even then being closed forever by just such another ministering angel of mercy and love.

CHAPTER VI.

DOROTHEA DIX.

1802-1887.

Great women belong to history and to self-sacrifice.

Lee Hunt.

Dorothea Dix has been called the most useful and distinguished woman America has yet produced.

Let us follow the events of her life and decide for ourselves whether this statement is true.

Dorothea Lynde Dix was born April 4, 1802, at Hamden, Maine.

my God.

I would have such a great author photo if I could stand outside Dorothea Dix.

It's such an old psychiatric hospital.

It looks really cool, especially in the fall when the fall hits and the trees turn.

And historians have gone back and they basically say we've never had outcomes as good as that during that time when moral therapy, as it was called, held sway in the United States.

The moral treatment idea inspired a stubborn school teacher named Dorothea Dix.

She took up the cause and crisscrossed the country, calling for more state funding.

I proceed, gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of insane persons confined within this commonwealth in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens, chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.