Dorothea Dix Crusade for the Mentally ILL

dawna

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Dorothea Lynde Dix was born on April 4, 1802 in Hampden, Maine. Her parents were Joseph and Mary Dix. Her father was a traveling preacher and alcoholic. Her mother was emotionally unstable and unable to handle the family responsibilities. Because her mother was unable to take care of her family alone, Dorothea cared for her two younger brothers and assisted with household chores. The pressure of taking care of the family took its toil on Dorothea. When she was twelve, she ran away from home. She lived with various relatives in Worcester, Massachusetts.

When she was fourteen, Dorothea opened a school for children and taught there for three years. Dorothea was an excellent student and continued to study while teaching school. She was interested in science and wrote a textbook entitled, “Conversations on Common Things,” which was about the natural world. She was also very religious and always tried to help others less fortunate than she. In addition to running the first school she opened, she started a charity school for poor children named “The Hope.” Dorothea wrote books for the school children. In five years, she had written eight books. The responsibilities of running both of these schools made her ill and she traveled to England to recover.

While in England, she met Samuel Tuke, a Quaker who had built a hospital for mental patients. Tuke believed in the humane treatment of the mentally ill and advised that they be given books to read and allowed to listen to music. Tuke told Dix, “Just because a person may be insane upon one subject, does not necessarily mean that he will be insensible to human kindness.” Tuke’s humane treatment of mental patients was usual during this time. Many of the mental patients were kept in prisons alongside criminals, in filthy conditions or left on the street to fend for themselves.

When Dix visited Boston’s East Cambridge Jail, she saw scantily clad mental patients living alongside the criminals in cold, filthy cells. Dix was outraged at the conditions and voiced her concerns for the mental patients. The jailer responded to her by saying the lunatics could not feel the cold. This incident was the turning point in Dix’s life. She visited jails and poorhouses around the U.S. and documented her findings. In her report to the Massachusetts state legislature in December, 1842, she said,

“I have come to present to you the strong claims of suffering humanity. I come as the advocate of the helpless, forgotten, insane men and women held in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens; chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience. I beg, I implore you to put away the spirit of selfishness and self-seeking. Lay off the armor of local strife and political ambition. Forget, I beg you, the earthly and perishable, the thought without mercy. Gentlemen, I commit you to a sacred cause!”

She enlisted public officials to present her reports. As a result of her reports published in the “Boston Advertiser” and the “Boston Courier,” many states passed laws, provided funding and built hospitals for the humane care of mental patients. In 1845, she successfully campaigned to establish New Jersey’s first mental hospital in Trenton. From 1845 to 1848, she traveled across the U.S. investigating the treatment of mental patients and advising government officials about how to improve conditions. In support of her cause, railroad and steamboat companies paid for all her travel expenses.

Dix expanded her crusade for the humane treatment of mental patients to France, Russia, Scotland and Turkey. She was able to encourage the Pope to improve the treatment of mental patients in Italy. During the Civil War, Dix served as superintendent of nurses for the Union army. She maintained clean and efficient field hospitals. After the Civil War, Dix continued campaigning for the reform of mental-patient care throughout the rest of her life.

On July 17, 1887, Dix died in her apartment located at the Trenton hospital she had campaigned to establish. She is buried at Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. The American flag and the standard of the Corps of Army Nurses fly over her grave. Her tombstone simply reads: Dorothea L. Dix. Today’s humane treatment of mental patients is the result of the efforts of Dorothea Dix. She is remembered as a great humanitarian and the “most distinguished woman America has ever produced.”
 
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Hi, this is a pretty old thread but I have started reading:

Gollaher, David (1995), Voice for the Mad: The Life of Dorothea Dix, New York: Free Press

Just thought I'd jot down a real informal book summary. I'm about 1/4 of the way through so I'll post more as I go.



Ms. Dix was born into tragic circumstances but rose above her traumatic childhood to become a major and influential reformer in America. She had a dramatic and positive affect on many people’s lives with her actions still being felt well over a hundred years later, though there is much work to be accomplished in her area of concern, care for the mentally ill.

Born in the America of the early Republic in 1802 to a family that seemed to be moving upward along with the fortunes of the rising nation, Dorothea appeared to have been lucky in birth. But while her grandfather was making a fortune out of the limitless potential of the raw frontier, his son—her father—just could not make it. Instead of going into business he took a vow of poverty and became a traveling Methodist preacher dependent on strangers for food and shelter. It was a tough life for a child. Worse was the fact her father became a crippling alcoholic who took turns between religious euphoria and the bottle. Later in life she would rarely speak of her childhood and even told people she was an orphan. To escape the grinding poverty and erratic behavior of her immediately family she ran away to her cold and strict widowed grandmother. This was a move up in material circumstances but she still did not find the nurturing love a young person longs for.

But it was at her grandmother Dix’s mansion that she found the freedom to begin to find her own way in the world. Dorothea Dix was an intensely driven person. Her religious education had taught her to always strive towards perfection and doing good, for that’s what God had given to Christians as a path to salvation. She was determined to find her calling, as God had given to her. And it was in education that Dorothea found this calling. She talked her grandmother into allowing her to open a school in the mansion and she became an exceptional teacher. She then branched out into writing and became a successful writer of schoolbooks for children, with an emphasis on promoting education for girls.

Interestingly, Dorothea brought her experience of strict discipline to her school. She had herself been beaten as a child—sometimes very brutally--and saw it as normal to inflict corporal punishment on her students. This was to be one area of her life that she transformed dramatically. Her entire worldview of teaching, caring for the mentally ill and social intercourse would begin to change with the joining of the new Unitarian Church in Boston. This church saw God as unified in all humanity. The Unitarian impulse to do good inspired her to exert herself much more vigorously in education, while writing and holding a job as a governess for a wealthy family. Everyone that knew her was impressed with her energy, but this exertion caught up with her and her physical and mental health simply gave out. Bedridden, weak, and severely depressed, she was confined to bed for months unable to function at all.

It was this debilitating illness that actually started her on another new path in life. Not knowing how to cure her, a rich friend sent her to Europe in the hopes she would be revitalized by the trip. Cast upon the waves of fate, not knowing a soul in Europe, she literally washed up on the doorstep of one of Great Britain’s great reformers William Rathbone almost by accident. Rathbone was a Quaker, a religion that similar to Unitarianism that saw the spark of Christ in every human’s eye. The Rathbone family took Dorothea in and treated her like a member of the family and showered love, attention and care on her as she had never experienced before. She quickly regained her health. The Rathbones then introduced her to reformers for the care of the mentally ill that used similar tactics in caring for the insane. Care, understanding and freedom from anxiety were methods used in the new Asylum movement taking shape in England. It all suddenly made sense to her. Much of her own mental instability, anxiety and depression had stemmed from the fact no one had ever really cared about her or treated her civilly. Her whole upbringing had been shaped by brutality, irrational emotion, neglect and a cold moral code she had to live up to. She had been introduced to the causes of her own suffering and was ready to use that knowledge to help others.
 
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