Warmest thanks to StargazerNC for starting and continuing the fight to make the Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh, NC, a National Monument.
Read the story of this astounding forgotten American below the orange squiggle.
Then please add your name to the Change.org petition
Sign the Petition from Change.org. Petitioning President of the United States
This petition will be delivered to:
President of the United States Barack Obama
Secretary Jewell, Department of Interior
Issue Proclamation creating National Monument to honor Dorothea Dix
The imminent sale of the 608 acres that remain of the former Dorothea Dix Hospital campus endangers historic buildings and a patients' cemetery. Pleas to preserve part of the site to benefit those in NC with mental illness go ignored by the Governor and the Mayor of Raleigh.
By signing this petition, I agree that President Obama should issue a proclamation under the Antiquities Act creating a monument in Raleigh to honor Dorothea Dix and her legacy.
https://www.change.org/....
Dorothea Dix 1802-1887
“I come as advocate of helpless, forgotten, insane men and women”
Sunday, March 28, 1841 was a raw cold day in Boston. Dorothea Dix was a thirty-nine year old woman who ran a private school teaching girls to read and write. On this cold day, she was volunteering to teach a Sunday School class for the twenty women inmates at the East Cambridge Jail.
After the lesson was over, she ignored the strong objections of the jailer, and walked through the prison. Prostitutes, drunks, criminals, retarded individuals, and the mentally ill were all housed together in unheated, unfurnished, and foul-smelling quarters.
Dorothea went down to the dungeon cells where the “dangerous” insane were chained. She saw miserable, wild and stuporous men and women chained to walls and locked into pens-naked, filthy, brutalized, underfed, given no heat, sleeping on stone floors. When asked why the jail was in these conditions her answer was, "the insane do not feel heat or cold."
At once she started a campaign to have stoves placed in the cells and to have the inmates fully clothed. She took the matter to the courts and after a series of battles finally won.
Dorothea Dix traveled from county to county, gathering evidence to present to the Massachusetts Legislature as the basis for laws to improve conditions. She made careful and extensive notes as she visited with jailers, caretakers and townspeople. Finally she put together all this data and shaped a carefully worded document.
Making use of her friendship with the governor, she was able to appear before the Massachusetts legislature to deliver her findings.
“I come to present the strong claims of suffering humanity. I come to place before the Legislature of Massachusetts the condition of the miserable, the desolate, the outcast. I come as advocate of helpless, forgotten, insane men and women; of beings sunk to a condition from which the unconcerned world would start with real horror.”
Women did not speak in public at this time. She was terrified, but despite her timid presentation, she completely won over the legislative board because her conviction was so powerful. Her reports—filled with dramatic accounts of prisoners flogged, starved, chained, physically and sexually abused by their keepers, and left naked and without heat or sanitation—shocked her audience and galvanized a movement to improve conditions for the imprisoned and insane.
After a heated debate, the material won legislative support and funds were set aside for the expansion of Worcester State Hospital.
From her home state, in spite of growing health problems, she traveled on to other New England states and finally to every state east of the Mississippi. In all she played a major role in founding 32 mental hospitals, 15 schools for the feeble minded, a school for the blind, and numerous training facilities for nurses. Her efforts were an indirect inspiration for the building of many additional institutions for the mentally ill. She was also instrumental in establishing libraries in prisons, mental hospitals and other institutions. She also traveled in Europe and helped improve conditions there.
Dorothea Dix was an outstanding leader in the fight for humanitarian reform of American mental institutions. But her achievements are often not even mentioned in textbooks covering the history of psychology. She is missing from most American history textbooks as well.
"Women have always been an equal part of the past. We just haven't been a part of history." - Gloria Steinem
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Bumb, Jenn, Webster University graduate student paper
Marshall, H.E. (1937). Dorothea Dix, forgotten Samaritan. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Viney, W. & Zorich, S. (1982). Contributions to the history of psychology XXIX: Dorothea Dix. Psychological Reports, 50, 211-218.