Dorothea Dix

Dorothea Lynde Dix was an American activist, educator, and reformer who campaigned on behalf of indigent people with mental illness and helped establish the first generation of state-funded psychiatric hospitals in the United States and several European countries. During the American Civil War she served as Superintendent of Army Nurses for the Union.

Dix was born on April 4, 1802, in Hampden, Maine, the eldest child of itinerant Methodist preacher Joseph Dix and Mary Bigelow. She left home at twelve to live with her grandmother in Boston and at fifteen began teaching school. In 1821 she opened a school for girls in Boston and later wrote Conversations on Common Things (1824), a popular children's textbook.

Recurrent illness led her to travel in Britain in 1836, where she encountered the social-reform circle of William Rathbone and the Tuke family of York Retreat. Returning to Massachusetts, in March 1841 she began teaching a Sunday-school class at the East Cambridge jail and observed mentally ill inmates held without heating in winter. Her 1843 "Memorial" to the Massachusetts legislature documented these conditions across the state.

Over the following decades she conducted similar surveys in more than a dozen US states and across Europe, lobbying legislatures to fund and reform asylums; her advocacy is associated with the founding of more than thirty psychiatric institutions. From 1861 to 1865 she organised Union army nursing. She died on July 17, 1887, at the New Jersey State Hospital in Trenton, aged 85.

Her name Dorothea derives from the Greek Dōrothéa, from dōron meaning "gift" and theos meaning "god," thus "gift of God." Dorothea has been used in Christian Europe since the early medieval period.