Dorothea Dix: A Mental Health Advocate
“I come to present the strong claims of suffering humanity.” - Dorothea Dix
Written by Sydney Kim
Upon arriving at her grandmother’s home in Boston, little did Dorothea Lynde Dix know about her future as one of America’s leading healthcare advocates of the 19th century. Instead, Dix opened a schoolhouse.
Born on April 4th, 1802 in Hampden, Maine, then a region of Massachusetts, Dix grew up quickly; her father was often absent due to travel and her mother had health issues. Around twelve years old, Dix had left home to stay with her grandmother to become an elementary school teacher. However, the stressful demands of the profession caused Dix to fall into one of the lowest points in her life. In 1836, taking advice from her close friends, Dix took a year-long trip to Europe where she met several contemporary reformers such as William Rathbone, Elizabeth Fry, and Samuel Tuke, who inspired her to extend reform across the Atlantic.
Dorothea Dix / By Samuel Bell Waugh / Oil on canvas, 1868 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
The 1840s saw a wave of reform efforts, including abolitionism, temperance, women’s rights, and prison reform. Rather than keeping with the Medieval belief that the mentally ill were cursed with spirits, people began to perceive them as willingly disobedient. Thus, when the public adopted the idea that prisons should reform as well as punish, the mentally ill were crammed into the same prisons as sane criminals. As the American population boomed, the working class followed, and state legislatures gradually dissolved the long-contested debtor’s prisons. Criminal codes and capital offenses were reduced, and the nation saw the decline of corporal punishment. Yet, there was still a long way to go, thought Dix when she returned to America in 1837.
In 1841, Dix began teaching Sunday School to female inmates at the East Cambridge House of Corrections. She observed first-hand the degree of mistreatment and neglect prevalent in the Massachusetts jail system, which became the foundation of her pamphlet “Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts” (1843). Naming the abuses and grim conditions she saw in the prisons of each town, Dix implored the state legislature to notice such atrocities: “I tell what I have seen—painful and shocking as the details often are… 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.” Eventually, her efforts paid off — Massachusetts built separate facilities for the mentally ill— but Dix was only getting started.
Dix continued to visit numerous prisons, especially on the East Coast. She helped establish mental hospitals in New Jersey, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. In the 1850s, she traveled to Washington D.C. to call for a federal policy that would set aside and sell millions of acres to fund the construction of asylums. Her “Ten Million Acre Bill” was passed by both Houses of Congress but vetoed by Franklin Pierce; the President had seen the legislation as an encroachment on states’ rights, undoubtedly one of the major causes of the growing rift between North and South.
Soon after the American Civil War erupted in 1861, Dix was appointed Superintendent of Army Nurses for the Union forces. Often challenging male authorities and other volunteer groups (such as the United States Sanitary Commission), she became known as “Dragon Dix” for her strict approach. She set restrictions for volunteers, hoping to keep the nurses safe from sexual abuse: women had to be between 35 to 50 years old and “plain looking” while wearing only black or brown dresses without any jewelry or cosmetics. Postbellum, Dix was particularly welcomed by the South, where she helped redesign hospitals and mental health institutions.
Dorothea Dix and other nurses during American Civil War. Public Domain.
In 1881, due to a reoccuring bout of illness, Dix moved into Trenton’s New Jersey State Hospital that she had helped build decades earlier. She died there on July 17, 1887, at the age of 85. However, Dix’s legacy lives on through the over 30 hospitals she founded or helped expand in the U.S. and abroad; her work reached beyond a national scale. From her late teens to through Reconstruction, Dix’s dedication and strength well-supported her maxim that “every ill [has] an antidote.”
Sign of Dorothea Dix Hospital. Public Domain.
Sources
Backus, Paige Gibbons. “Dorothea Dix: Reformer, Author, Teacher, Nurse.” American Battlefield Trust, www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/dorothea-dix-reformer-author-teacher-nurse.
Kennedy, David M., and Lizabeth Cohen. The American Pageant. 16th ed., Cengage Learning, 2016. Cengage Mobile.
Levin, Aaron. “Behind the Legend of Dorothea Dix Rests a Woman “Famous but Unknown.”” Psychiatric News, vol. 54, no. 7, 2 Apr. 2019. American Psychiatric Association, https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.pn.2019.4a13.
