Dorothea Dix (4 April 1802-17 July 1887) was an American social reformer and advocate for the creation of the United States' first mental asylums to treat the mentally ill.
Biography[]
Dorothea Dix was born in Hampden, Maine in 1802 and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts, the daughter of a Methodist preacher; she was raised Catholic and Congregationalist before becoming a Unitarian. She became a teacher at the age of fourteen, and she came to teach poor and neglected children at a school within a barn. Dix worked as a governess before founding a model school for girls in Boston in 1831. After suffering a breakdown in 1836, she went to Britain to recover her health, and it was there that she became inspired by the British reform movement; she also discovered the existence of advanced mental asylums in Turkey. On her return to America in 1840, Dix became an advocate for abolitionism, women's suffrage, and the mentally ill. As a result of her advocacy, Pennsylvania opened the country's first mental asylum in Harrisburg. During the American Civil War, Dix served as Superintendent of Army Nurses for the Union Army, caring for both Union and Confederate soldiers and becoming well-respected in both the North and South. Dix continued her advocacy after the war, and she died in one of her own hospitals in 1887.
Gallery[]
