Obituary for DOROTHEA DIX

Dorothea Dix belonged to a generation of straight-backed New England women whose religious faith inspired them to expose and battle social injustice. Teaching Sunday School in an East Cambridge prison, the 38-year-old Dix was sickened by what she found: damaged children, violent criminals and half-clothed patients from the overcrowded state mental hospital crowded together, shaking in the March chill. Moral outrage transformed the timid teacher into a humanitarian crusader. Over the next decade, she travelled across the United States and Europe, reporting on the appalling conditions of jails and asylums, pressuring politicians, presidents and Pope Pius IX for kinder, gentler homes devoted specifically to the care of the incurably insane. When Dix turned her attention to the issue, in the early 1840s, the United States possessed 12 public asylums for the insane poor; thanks in part to Dix’s relentless lobbying, by the time she died, a hundred and eleven more had opened their doors to the deserted and impoverished mentally ill.

-Victoria Cain, Assistant Professor of History, Northeastern University

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This biographical sketch is funded in part by Mass Humanities.