Portrait of Dorothea Lynde Dix, from NLM’s Images from the History of Medicine database.
Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802-1887) was one of the most influential lay social reformers to focus on the care and treatment of the mentally ill in 19th-century America. After starting a career as a school teacher in Massachusetts, Dix became aware of the abject conditions under which mentally ill persons in the state were held and treated: many of them kept restrained in dank prisons with little or no clothing, heat, or treatment. Campaigning first in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and then around the country, she approached numerous private donors, state legislatures and the US Congress to make funding available to build humane facilities for the mentally ill.
During these campaigns, Dix wrote several dozen “memorials” and other pamphlets to lobby for her cause, and the National Library of Medicine has begun digitizing them as part of its “Medicine in the Americas” project. Many of these items are already available on its Digital Collections page. Included in her pamphlets, most of which were aimed at state legislatures, are often vivid descriptions of the conditions in which she found mentally ill persons in the state. In her 1845 Memorial to the State Legislature of New Jersey, Dix opens with the statement that, “within the last few months, I have traversed a considerable portion of your state, and have found, in jails and poor-houses, and wandering at will over the country, large numbers of insane and idiotic persons, whose irresponsibility and imbecility render them objects of deep commiseration.” She then goes on to describe very graphically mentally ill patients caged or chained to the walls of various poor houses in the state, sometimes for decades, with only a minimum of care. In a similar Memorial to the legislature of Massachusetts in 1843 she describes seeing mentally ill inmates “chained, hand and foot” at the almshouse in Pepperell and two women in Dedham “in stalls … ly[ing] in bunks filled with straw, always shut up.”
Dorothea Dix also campaigned for more humane prisons, and NLM has digitized two editions of her influential book, Remarks on Prisons and Prison Discipline in the United States, published in Boston and Philadelphia in 1845.
Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts: In behalf of the pauper insane and idiots in jails and poorhouses throughout the Commonwealth (Boston, 1843).
Dix’s campaigns led to the opening of over 30 hospitals around the United States and in Europe, where she also traveled and lobbied extensively. After later serving as a nurse during the American Civil War and participating in other social reform efforts, Miss Dix eventually retired in 1881 to rooms set aside for her by the State Legislature at the New Jersey State Hospital in Morris Plains. She died there in 1887.
Other works by Dix included in NLM’s Digital Collections are:
Memorial, to the Honorable the Legislature of the State of New-York, 1844.
Memorial Soliciting a State Hospital for the Insane: Submitted to the Legislature of Pennsylvania, February 3, 1845.
Memorial Soliciting Enlarged and Improved Accommodations for the Insane of the State of Tennessee by the Establishment of a New Hospital, 1847.
Memorial of D.L. Dix: Praying a Grant of Land for the Relief and Support of the Indigent Curable and Incurable Insane in the United States, 1848.
Memorial Soliciting a State Hospital for the Insane: Submitted to the Legislature of Alabama, November 15, 1849.
For more information about NLM’s Digital Collections and books relating to Dorothea Dix and early American mental health, please contact Michael North, Head of Rare Books and Early Manuscripts at northm (at) mail (dot) nih (dot) gov.
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!