biography
| name: |
Dix, Dorothea (Lynde)
|
| sex:
| female
|
| lived:
| (1802–87)
|
| biography:
| Reformer and nurse, born in Hampden, Maine, USA. She left an unhappy home at age 10 to live with her grandmother in Boston. Resourceful and determined, by age 14 she was on her own and teaching school in Worcester, MA. She established her own school in Boston, running it successfully (1821–34) until a tubercular illness, a recurring affliction, forced her to give it up. After a period of invalidism, she dedicated herself to the quiet study of conditions of insane asylums, prisons, and alms houses, at first in Massachusetts and eventually in many states, Canada, and Europe. What she found appalled her: men and women chained to the walls of tiny, dark, and fetid rooms, ill-clothed and under-fed, and treated brutally when they were noticed at all. Remaining in the background, she used influential political leaders to broadcast her findings. During 1842–5 she travelled more than 10 000 miles on her investigations. The results were a gradual and continuing improvement of conditions. New asylums were built in many states, and others improved, and more humane methods of caring for the insane were adopted. She became superintendent of women nurses for the federal government (1861), in which role she oversaw the recruitment, training, and placement of some 2000 women who cared for the Union war-wounded. After the war she resumed her work among the insane, travelling widely in Europe and Japan. Hardworking, dedicated to the humanitarian cause in spite of continuing illness, she could seem cold and even distant; ‘I have no particular love for my species’ she once said, ‘but own to an exhaustless fund of compassion’. She died in Trenton, NJ in a hospital that she herself had founded. |
|
|
