USH - Dorothea Dix - Church

Dorothea Dix was born in Hampden, Maine, on April 4, 1802. Her family life was nonexistent at best, even abusive, as her mother had poor mental health and her father was an abusive alcoholic. Almost as soon as her two younger brothers (Joseph and Charles) were born, she cared for them, taking over the role of raising them. When the fighting at home got to be too much for her, she would often find refuge at her paternal grandmother’s house in Boston.

Even though her family situation left much to be desired, her father did teach Dix many things that would eventually influence her choices in life. For one, he taught her to read and write at a young age, giving her an advantage over the other students when she entered school. This knowledge led to a passion for teaching and reading, evident in the fact that she also taught her brothers to read when they were young. Her parents were later declared incapable of caring for their children, and the Dorothea and her brothers moved into her grandmother’s house, the Dix Mansion in Boston. Her grandmother was very wealthy and thus demanded that Dorothea act as a young wealthy girl should, with proper manners and such.

Dorothea, with help from her second cousin, Edward Bangs (to whom she was engaged for a time), opened a little school to teach young girls. Although she closed it after about three years, she did go on to open a school at Dix Mansion with two different classes: one as a charity for poor girls and one catering to wealthy girls. However, her health took a turn for the worse and she had to give up her career as a teacher.

After a vacation to England to recuperate, she returned to Boston and began her second career, and advocate for the reform of treatment for the mentally ill. Her achievements would spark immediate response, and her changes and beliefs are still felt today in how mental patients are treated. Upon her return to Boston, she discovered that the mentally ill were housed in an “unheated, unfurnished, and foul-smelling” jail, along with prostitutes, drunks, and criminals.

She immediately went to court upon discovering this, and eventually won, beginning to investigate treatment of mentally ill patients. Her work helped to pass legislation in Massachusetts (and later in the United States as a whole) funding hospitals and mandating better treatment of the mentally ill, something that was seen as radical at the time. (The popular belief was that “the insane would never be cured and that living within their dreadful conditions was enough for them.”) Showing that through kind care and treatment, these mentally ill patients could actually recover, she was perhaps the “most effective advocate of humanitarian reform in American mental institutions during the nineteenth century.”