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- This article is about the 19th-century activist. For the journalist see Dorothy Dix.
Dorothea Lynde Dix (April 4, 1802 – July 17, 1887) was a social activist who, from the early 1840s to well after the American Civil War lobbied almost every State's legislature to create asylums for the insane.
By the mid-1830s she became depressed. In England, she spent a year living on the estate of the Rathbone family, eminent Quaker reformers, where she recovered.
During the Civil War she moved to Washington, D.C., and attempted to set up a nursing service for soldiers. She became Superintendent of Union Army Nurses. After the War, she resumed her lobbying for the mentally ill, now by letter more often than in person.
She spent her last years living as a guest in the New Jersey State Hospital in Trenton.
See also
Recommended Reading
- Gollaher, David: Voice for the Mad: The Life of Dorothea Dix, (The Free Press, 1995)
References
- Bumb, Jenn. "Dorothea Dix." Women's Intellectual Contributions to the Study of Mind and Society.
1802 births | 1887 deaths | People from Maine | American nurses | Baldwin, Evarts, Hoar & Sherman family | Women in the American Civil War
"Dorothea Dix"