Dorothea dix biography civil war

What did dorothea dix do in the civil war

Dorothea Dix was a social reformer whose devotion to the welfare of the mentally ill led to widespread international reforms. After seeing horrific conditions in a Massachusetts prison, she spent the next 40 years lobbying U. Her efforts directly affected the building of 32 institutions in the United States. She was the eldest of three children, and her father, Joseph Dix, was a religious fanatic and distributor of religious tracts who made Dorothea stitch and paste the tracts together, a chore she hated.

At age 12, Dix left home to live with her grandmother in Boston, and then an aunt in Worcester, Massachusetts. She began teaching school at age In , she returned to Boston and founded the Dix Mansion, a school for girls, along with a charity school that poor girls could attend for free. She began writing textbooks, with her most famous, Conversations on Common Things , published in She discovered the appalling treatment of the prisoners, particularly those with mental illnesses, whose living quarters had no heat.

She immediately went to court and secured an order to provide heat for the prisoners, along with other improvements. She began traveling around the state to research the conditions in prisons and poorhouses and ultimately crafted a document that was presented to the Massachusetts legislature, which increased the budget to expand the State Mental Hospital at Worcester.

She toured the country documenting the conditions and treatment of patients, campaigning to establish humane asylums for the mentally ill and founding or adding additions to hospitals in Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Maryland, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina and North Carolina.

Dix also lobbied at the federal level, and in she asked Congress to grant more than 12 million acres of land as a public endowment to be used for the benefit of the mentally ill as well as the blind and deaf. Both houses of Congress approved the bill, but in it was vetoed by President Franklin Pierce. Discouraged by the setback, Dix went to Europe.