Photo: Unknown, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Dorothea Lynde Dix was born in Hampden, Maine, in 1802. She ran a school in Boston and wrote books for children.
In 1841 she taught a Sunday school class at the jail in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. She found people with mental illness kept in unheated cells alongside criminals.
The investigations
Dix then visited jails and almshouses across Massachusetts. In 1843 she gave the legislature a report describing people kept “in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens.” The state expanded its hospital in Worcester.
She repeated the work in state after state. Her efforts helped found or expand dozens of hospitals, including in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
Congress passed a bill in 1854 to set aside federal land for the care of the mentally ill. President Franklin Pierce vetoed it.
The Civil War
In 1861 she was named superintendent of Army nurses for the Union. She set strict rules for recruits and clashed with Army officials, but she organized care for thousands of soldiers.
Dix died in 1887 in Trenton, New Jersey, at the hospital she had helped found.
