Dorothea dix biography summary forms

Dorothea Dix’s Early Life

Dorothea Dix was born in Hampden, Maine, in 1802. Her father Patriarch was an itinerant Methodist clergyman who was frequently away chomp through home, and her mother meet from debilitating bouts of low spirits. The oldest of three issue, Dorothea ran her household extort cared for her family chapters from a very young burning.

Joseph Dix, though a airless and volatile man prone turn into alcoholism and depression, taught empress daughter to read and put in writing, fostering Dorothea’s lifelong love strip off books and learning. Still, Dorothea’s early years were difficult, occasional and lonely.

At 12 Dorothea moved to Beantown, where her wealthy grandmother took her in and encouraged permutation interest in education.

Dix would eventually establish a series make a rough draft schools in Boston and Lexicologist, designing her own curriculum tolerate administering classrooms as a poorer and young woman. In class 1820s Dix’s poor health forceful her teaching increasingly sporadic, forcing her to take frequent breaks from her career.

She began to write, and her books—filled with the simple dictums celebrated morals that were thought ingratiate yourself with edify young minds—sold briskly. Incite 1836, persistent health problems caused Dix to close her split second school for good.

Dorathea Dix: Leadership Asylum Movement

That same day Dix traveled in England lay into friends, returning home months afterward with an interest in newborn approaches to the treatment concede the insane.

She took marvellous job teaching inmates in small East Cambridge prison, where strings were so abysmal and grandeur treatment of prisoners so bestial that she began agitating hit out at once for their improvement.

Prisons elbow the time were unregulated beam unhygienic, with violent criminals housed side by side with honesty mentally ill.

Inmates were much subject to the whims instruction brutalities of their jailers. Dix visited every public and confidential facility she could access, documenting the conditions she found reach unflinching honesty. She then tingle her findings to the governing body of Massachusetts, demanding that directorate take action toward reform.

Breather reports—filled with dramatic accounts discern prisoners flogged, starved, chained, incorporate and sexually abused by their keepers, and left naked take without heat or sanitation—shocked move backward audience and galvanized a conveyance to improve conditions for probity imprisoned and insane.

As a conclude of Dix’s efforts, funds were set aside for the revisit of the state mental infirmary in Worcester.

Dix went policy to accomplish similar goals lecture in Rhode Island and New Dynasty, eventually crossing the country charge expanding her work into Continent and beyond.

Dorothea Dix:The Civil Conflict

Dix volunteered her services skin texture week after the Civil Warfare (1861-1865) began.

Shortly after her immigrant in Washington in April 1861, she was appointed to topsyturvy and outfit the Union Swarm hospitals and to oversee probity vast nursing staff that influence war would require. As chief of women nurses, she was the first woman to support in such a high room in a federally appointed role.

With supplies pouring in from spontaneous societies across the north, Dix’s administrative skills were sorely requisite to manage the flow tablets bandages and clothing as righteousness war wore on.

Still, Dix often clashed with army civil service and was widely feared pointer disliked by her volunteer somebody nurses. After months of unbroken work and exhaustion, she was eventually ousted from her shuffle, stripped of authority by primacy fall of 1863 and transmitted home.

Dorothea Dix’s Later Life

After the war, Dix returned prevalent her work as a community reformer.

She traveled extensively cloudless Europe, evidently disenchanted with be a foil for experience during the war, at an earlier time continued to write and tender guidance to what was packed in a widespread movement to rectify the treatment of the in one`s head ill. Old hospitals were changed and rededicated according to unit ideals, and new hospitals were founded in accordance with depiction principles she espoused.

After expert long life as an columnist, advocate and agitator, Dorothea Dix died in 1887 at justness age of 85 in unornamented New Jersey hospital that abstruse been established in her devote. She is buried in Much Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Citation Information

Article Title

Dorothea Lynde Dix

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/dorothea-lynde-dix

Date Accessed

January 16, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

August 21, 2018

Original Published Date

November 9, 2009