Dorothea Dix

Her father Joseph Dix was an itinerant bookseller and Methodist preacher, her mother was chronically unwell, and the house was bad enough that at 12 she and her two brothers were sent to a wealthy grandmother in Boston to get out of it. She was teaching in Worcester at 14. By 1824 she had written Conversations on Common Things, a children's primer that reached a 60th edition by 1869, and by 1831 she was running a model school for girls in Boston. It closed in 1836 when her health broke. She sailed for England to recover, boarded with the reforming Rathbone family near Liverpool, and while she was there her grandmother died and left her enough money that she never again had to earn a wage.

The method was inventory. Through the mid-1840s she covered more than 10,000 miles by stagecoach and inspected upward of 500 almshouses, 300 county jails and 18 state penitentiaries, writing down what she saw and handing the list to whichever legislature owned it. It worked in Massachusetts, then New Jersey, then most of the country, and then abroad: she surveyed Scottish asylums in 1854, and in Rome she got an audience with Pius IX, who went and looked at his own institutions. BriefHistory tells that campaign and what it built. This page is about the parts of her the campaign consumed.

Her largest single effort failed. She lobbied Congress for years to set aside 12,225,000 acres of federal land as a permanent endowment for the care of the mentally ill, got the bill through both houses, and watched Franklin Pierce veto it in 1854 on the ground that social welfare belonged to the states. The war went no better. Appointed Superintendent of Army Nurses on June 16, 1861, she required volunteers to be between 35 and 50 and plain-looking, allowed no jewelry or cosmetics, and fought the surgeons who resented losing staffing decisions to a civilian woman. In 1863 the Army gave doctors full authority over hospital personnel and she was left holding a title. She resigned in August 1865 and called the work a failure.

In 1881 she moved into the New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton, the first asylum her lobbying had produced, where the legislature kept a private suite for her as long as she lived. She died there on July 17, 1887, and was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. What she left is harder to praise cleanly now than it was then. She founded 32 hospitals and shaped two more in Japan, and within a century those state institutions were the thing a new generation of reformers was trying to empty. The method has aged better than the buildings: go and look, write down what is there, and hand the ledger to the people paying for it.

Dorothea Dix's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Conversations on Common Things book
  A children's primer that reached a 60th edition by 1869 1824
• The Garland of Flora book
  One of the first flower dictionaries published in America 1829
• Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts article
  An itemized report on how the state kept its mentally ill, not a plea 1843
• Remarks on Prisons and Prison Discipline in the United States book
  Written out of the same inspection tours 1845
• New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum, Trenton building
  The first hospital built on her lobbying, and where she died 1848

• 1816 aged ~14 Begins teaching at 14 in Worcester, Massachusetts She had been sent away from her parents to a grandmother in Boston two years earlier.
• 1831 aged ~29 Opens a model school for girls in Boston It ran until 1836, when her health collapsed and she sailed for England.
• 1841 aged ~39 Teaches a class at the East Cambridge jail and goes down to the basement She found four mentally ill people in cells she described as dark and bare, the air stagnant and foul.
• 1843 aged ~41 Submits the Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts
• March 25, 1845 aged 42 New Jersey authorizes its first state asylum after her survey of every county Joseph S. Dodd had introduced her report on January 23.
• 1854 aged ~52 Franklin Pierce vetoes her federal land bill It would have set aside 12,225,000 acres as an endowment. Both houses had passed it.
• June 16, 1861 aged 59 Appointed Superintendent of Army Nurses for the Union Army
• 1863 aged ~61 The Army hands doctors full control of hospital staff and strips her authority
• 1881 aged ~79 Moves into a suite at the Trenton hospital she had caused to be built The legislature reserved it for her use for the rest of her life.

• Franklin Pierce 1804–1869
  Fourteenth president whose support for the Kansas-Nebraska Act deepened the sectional crisis over slavery. vetoed her bill
• Horace Mann 1796–1859
  Reformist who championed public education and is considered the father of the American public school system. fellow Massachusetts reformer
• Charles Sumner 1811–1874
  Massachusetts senator and abolitionist leader who pressed for Reconstruction-era civil rights legislation. backed her memorial
• Clara Barton 1821–1912
  Civil War nurse who founded the American Red Cross and pioneered disaster relief in America. wartime counterpart
• Louisa May Alcott 1832–1888
  Author of Little Women and a founding figure of American domestic fiction. nursed under her corps
• Elizabeth Blackwell 1821–1910
  First woman to receive a medical degree in the United States and a pioneer of women’s medical education. trained Union nurses in parallel