Commanding in height and manner, Dorothea Dix (1802-1887) spent decades advocating on behalf of the mentally ill poor. Dix was part of a generation New England women whose religious faith inspired them to expose and battle social injustice, and she denounced the horrors suffered by the incurably insane, pointing to their humanity and pressing for better living conditions. Dix’s father, a ne’er-do-well from a prominent family, hopscotched his family around New England before finding evangelism. At 14, Dolly fled to Massachusetts, abandoning her parents’ feverish Methodism for a quieter but no less pious Unitarian. She lengthened her skirts, pinned back her chestnut hair, and, as so many young unmarried women did, began to teach school. The chestnut-haired, serious-faced Dix declared that no one was to call her Dolly anymore, rechristening herself Dorothea. She frequented Boston’s many Unitarian churches and continued to teach, joining the staff of the Boston Female Monitorial School, publishing a series of popular readers, and eventually founding her own strict school in her grandmother’s deteriorating manse. Her poor health and uncompromising nature could made her an exhausting companion—as friend Anne Heath wrote after a visit from Dix, “I think her possessed of more good qualities than are often united in one person, but her presence here brings to my conscience an unsupportable burthen.” Yet that same relentless pursuit of righteousness proved excellent preparation for a life later devoted to social reform. When a friend asked her to volunteer as a Sunday school teacher in an East Cambridge prison, the 38-year-old Dix was sickened by what she found there. Damaged children, violent criminals and half-clothed patients from the overcrowded state mental hospital crowded together in a small outbuilding, shaking in the March chill. By June, she was making weekday visits to Boston’s prisons and hospitals to observe their failings. The next year, in 1842, she crisscrossed Massachusetts, taking notes on jails and almshouses from Stockbridge to Cape Cod. Outrage transformed the conservative teacher into a crusader. With humanitarian Samuel Gridley Howe (Lot 4987 Spruce Avenue), she pushed to improve the lives of the poor and insane. In 1843, she urged the state legislature to help for those “whose lives are the saddest picture of human suffering and degradation.” Over 35 pages of testimony, she described the terrible treatment of the mentally ill, detailing the daily lives of those “confined within this Commonwealth, in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens! Chained naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience!” Massachusetts ought to provide its most vulnerable citizens with safe and peaceful places to live and die, she argued, places where they wouldn’t be shackled alongside the criminal or the violent. Chains, bloodletting, and beatings had done no good, she asserted. Instead, Dix pushed for asylums offering routine, intellectual stimulation, meaningful work, and a sense of community. Excerpted in newspapers around the state, her writing provoked outrage and, gradually, action. Dix wasn’t the first to make such arguments, but she quickly became the face and voice of p asylum reform in the 1840s and 1850s. Travelling by stagecoach, sled, and lumber-wagon, she jolted her way across the United States and Europe, reporting on institutions’ appalling conditions. She rarely stayed more than a day in any town. In three years, she had travelled more than 10,000 miles for her cause. Famous for her moral zeal, the once shy Dix now pressured politicians, presidents and Pope Pius IX for kinder, gentler homes for the care of the incurably insane. Her reputation deteriorated during the American Civil War, when she attempted to organize the nation’s volunteer nursing corps. Would-be volunteers scoffed at her insistence that nurses should be plain, older than 30, and shabbily clothed. Her dour dedication irritated army doctors, and, in 1863, a newly appointed surgeon general relieved her of most of her official duties. As diarist George Templeton Strong, treasurer of the Sanitary Commission, noted, her independence doomed her service. “She does good, but no one can cooperate with her,” he observed, “for she belongs to the class of comets and can be subdued into relations with no system whatever.” After the war, she resumed her crusade to improve the care of prisoners, disabled, and mentally ill people. Whereas the United States had possessed 13 mental hospitals in 1843, by 1880, thanks to her unrelenting efforts, there were 123. This “missionary of mercy,” as reformer Julia Maria Child called her, was buried in a grove of myrtle trees and white lily plants that had been grown in one the many asylums she had helped to found. 

Biographical Portrait written by Victoria Cain, Assistant Professor of History, Northeastern University. Video created by Mount Auburn Cemetery Artist-in-Residence Roberto Mighty for earth.sky, a multi-media exhibit celebrating Mount Auburn Cemetery.

This project was funded in part by Mass Humanities.

By 1824 exhaustion and tuberculosis forced Dix to rest. She spent several summers as governess for the family of her friend, Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing (Lot # 678 Greenbrier Path). During this time, she also wrote several books for young readers, including an elementary science textbook CONVERSATIONS ON COMMON THINGS (1824), HYMNS FOR CHILDREN (1825), and AMERICAN MORAL TALES FOR YOUNG PERSONS (1832). 

Images: "Conversations on Common Things" by Dorothea Dix, 1824. Book digitized by Google from collections of Harvard University. From Internet Archive

Dix opened a new school in Boston in 1831, but poor health, possibly caused by over exhaustion, forced her to quite teaching once again. In 1836 Dix traveled to Liverpool, England in search of rest and recuperation. She stayed at Greenbank, the estate of the Unitarian minister and philanthropist William Rathbone, for 18 months. The Rathbones, friends of her mentor William Ellery Channing, introduced Dix to several leading British reformers. It was during her stay at Greenbank that Dix first and learned of new ideas in the way the mentally ill were treated. In 1838, Dix returned to America and lived quietly on an income left to her upon the death of her grandmother.

Image: "Green Bank, Residence of Roscoe's Friend, William Rathbone" from TWENTY-SIX LITHOGRAPHIC DRAWINGS: VIEWS IN THE VICINITY OF LIVERPOOL, Samuel Nicholson and George Nicholson, 1821.

In 1841 a Harvard divinity student asked her to teach Sunday school at the East Cambridge House of Correction. This day proved to be a turning point in her life, for here she witnessed the deplorable conditions in which prisoners and the mentally ill were housed. These scenes prompted Dix to spend the next eighteen months surveying jails, almshouses, and hospitals across the state. Boston social reformers including Samuel Gridley Howe (Lot # 4987 Spruce Avenue), educator Horace Mann, and Senator Charles Sumner (Lot # 2447 Arethusa Path) supported her cause.

Image: Daguerreotype of American activist Dorothea Dix, dated between 1840 and 1860. [bMS Am 1838 (994.2), Houghton Library, Harvard University]

Dix’s determination and appeal for reform were fueled by what she felt was the moral authority of feminine benevolence. In January 1843 Dix presented her findings before the Massachusetts Legislature in a now-famous “memorial.” In it, she described how again and again she found the insane confined “in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, and pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience!” (Memorial, 1843). Her appeal was a legislative petition, a sermon and a compelling statement of factual details. Her lobbying resulted in the immediate enlargement of the Worcester Asylum.

Images: "State Lunatic Hospital, Worcester, Massachusetts," original asylum building, ca. 1847. "Memorial. To the Legislature of Massachusetts." by Dorothea Dix, January 1843. [U.S. National Library of Medicine for the Internet Archive, http://www.archive.org/details/101174442.nlm.nih.gov]

Despite health problems and the difficulty of transportation, Dix continued to investigate conditions for the insane throughout New England and the rest of the country. She pushed state governments to assume proper care of the insane. Her campaigns in Rhode Island and New York were successful, as were those that followed in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Although in New Jersey she encountered bitter opposition, she herself helped design the building in Trenton and she called the New Jersey state hospital her first-born child. Eventually Dix visited every state of the union east of the Rocky Mountains. She sometimes remained in a state until the necessary appropriations for a new facility had been made, and occasionally had the honor of selecting a new site for a hospital. In all Dix inspired legislators in 15 states and in Canada to establish 32 state and countless non-state hospitals, together adding up to 120 new institutions. _____________________________________________ Images: New Jersey state lunatic asylum, Trenton / drawn and engrd. by J.J. Pease from a daguerreotype by J.X. Mason. [Between 1840 and 1880?] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress,

In 1848 Dix appealed to the national legislature to set aside five (and later twelve) million acres of land from the public domain as a perpetual trust, the income from which to be applied to care of the insane. Her appeal was passed by both houses of Congress but was ultimately vetoed by President Pierce on the grounds that responsibility for the insane lay with the states. Despite the setback, Dix was able to convince Congress to establish the nation's first federal psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C. St. Elizabeth's Hospital admitted its first patient in January of 1855. ________________________________ Image: Government Hospital for the Insane, Saint Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington, D.C. [Topographical plan of the grounds].1860, Copied Later. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress,

In 1861 Dix volunteered to serve as superintendent of nurses for the Union Army. She recruited and appointed women army nurses, weeding out those she deemed not qualified. Her policy that nurses must be “plain looking women” over 30 years old and her disputes with other hospital administrators reduced her effectiveness. After the war she resumed her mission to improve conditions for the insane, visiting hospitals and prisons in the South where many buildings had been damaged. ____________________________________ Image: "Circular" from the United States Surgeon-General's Office (William Alexander Hammond), 1862. From Internet Archive,

In 1983, the United States Postal Service issued a 1 cent stamp in honor of Dorothea Dix as part of their Great Americans Series. According to the USPS, "the popular Great Americans Series honors special Americans from all walks of life and honors them for their contributions to society and their fellow man. Sixty-four different stamps make up the complete set to pay tribute to important individuals who were leaders in education, the military, literature, the arts, and human and civil rights."