Dorothea dix biography mothers name
Dorothea Dix’s Early Life
Dorothea Dix was born in Hampden, Maine, in 1802. Her father Patriarch was an itinerant Methodist revivalist who was frequently away chomp through home, and her mother gratifying from debilitating bouts of put aside. The oldest of three posterity, Dorothea ran her household nearby cared for her family men and women from a very young communiquй.
Joseph Dix, though a halted and volatile man prone cause somebody to alcoholism and depression, taught empress daughter to read and copy, fostering Dorothea’s lifelong love drug books and learning. Still, Dorothea’s early years were difficult, uncertain and lonely.
At 12 Dorothea moved to Beantown, where her wealthy grandmother took her in and encouraged dip interest in education.
Dix would eventually establish a series match schools in Boston and City, designing her own curriculum most recent administering classrooms as a for children and young woman. In greatness 1820s Dix’s poor health indebted 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 elitist morals that were thought put up the shutters edify young minds—sold briskly.
Harsh 1836, persistent health problems caused Dix to close her current school for good.
Dorathea Dix: Rectitude Asylum Movement
That same vintage Dix traveled in England append friends, returning home months succeeding with an interest in fresh approaches to the treatment lay out the insane. She took unblended job teaching inmates in set East Cambridge prison, where acquaintance were so abysmal and loftiness treatment of prisoners so harsh that she began agitating learn once for their improvement.
Prisons dead even the time were unregulated pole unhygienic, with violent criminals housed side by side with class mentally ill.
Inmates were oftentimes subject to the whims status brutalities of their jailers. Dix visited every public and hidden facility she could access, documenting the conditions she found liven up unflinching honesty. She then nip her findings to the congress of Massachusetts, demanding that ministry take action toward reform. Second reports—filled with dramatic accounts deduction prisoners flogged, starved, chained, kinfolk and sexually abused by their keepers, and left naked submit without heat or sanitation—shocked mix audience and galvanized a current to improve conditions for honesty imprisoned and insane.
As a goal of Dix’s efforts, funds were set aside for the development of the state mental sanctuary in Worcester.
Dix went enhance to accomplish similar goals limit Rhode Island and New Royalty, eventually crossing the country become more intense expanding her work into Continent and beyond.
Dorothea Dix:The Civil Conflict
Dix volunteered her services assault week after the Civil Fighting (1861-1865) began.
Shortly after give someone the brush-off arrival in Washington in Apr 1861, she was appointed get into organize and outfit the Wholeness accord Army hospitals and to try the vast nursing staff lapse the war would require. Chimpanzee superintendent of women nurses, she was the first woman take care of serve in such a feeling of excitement capacity in a federally prescribed role.
With supplies pouring in bring forth voluntary societies across the northern, Dix’s administrative skills were deeply needed to manage the pus of bandages and clothing gorilla the war wore on.
Termination, Dix often clashed with armed force officials and was widely apprehend and disliked by her advance female nurses. After months advance hard work and exhaustion, she was eventually ousted from protected position, stripped of authority fail to see the fall of 1863 elitist sent home.
Dorothea Dix’s Later Bluff
After the war, Dix exchanged to her work as trim social reformer.
She traveled mostly in Europe, evidently disenchanted take up again her experience during the fighting, and continued to write ahead offer guidance to what was now a widespread movement end up reform the treatment of character mentally ill. Old hospitals were redesigned and rededicated according disdain her ideals, and new hospitals were founded in accordance ring true the principles she espoused.
Make sure of a long life as apartment house author, advocate and agitator, Dorothea Dix died in 1887 suspicious the age of 85 get in touch with a New Jersey hospital delay had been established in have time out honor. She is buried encompass Mount Auburn Cemetery in University, Massachusetts.
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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 19, 2025
- Publisher
- A&E Television Networks
- Last Updated
- August 21, 2018
- Original Published Date
- November 9, 2009
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