Today’s Crusading Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Dorothea Dix was a teacher, a nurse, and a social reformer, best known for her untiring commitment to proving humane living conditions for the mentally ill. As one of her biographers wrote she was an example of the “rare cases in history where a social movement of such proportions can be attributed to the work of a single individual.”
Dorothea Dix: American Heroine
Dix was born in Maine in 1802. The eldest of three children, she had an abusive alcoholic father and a mentally unstable mother. She took it upon herself to raise her two infant brothers and as a result had no childhood of her own. Fortunately she had well-heeled relatives in Massachusetts who took pity on her and took her in at age thirteen. Her extended family’s wealth and political connections proved invaluable in her future.
Despite little formal education, Dix was intellectually gifted and driven. She also received the emotional support and encouragement from her new family that she never had as a child. At the age of 15 she opened a private school in Worcester, Massachusetts where she taught young girls at a time when there were little to no educational opportunities available to females. Five years later she would open a similar school in Boston.
Dorothea Dix experienced a life altering event in 1841 when she visited a local jail in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, as it was everywhere, the insane were thrown in amongst the homicidal. She was shocked to observe mental cases chained naked to stone walls in filthy cells without heat or ventilation. The inhumanity she witnessed that day inspired what would be a lifelong crusade to improve the treatment of the mentally ill. With the help of family connections she managed to gain the attention of the Boston press and the resulting public outcry shamed the Massachusetts State Legislature into authorizing funds to improve the dreadful conditions she brought to light.
Following up on her success in Massachusetts, Dix traveled extensively in America, Europe, and Asia, observing and exposing similar barbaric conditions and spurring a worldwide demand for change. In the United States, her efforts were rewarded when the first state funded hospital for the mentally ill was opened in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1848. This was the second asylum built following what is now called the Kirkbride Plan in honor of Dr. Thomas Kirkbride, a friend and colleague of Miss Dix who shared the same humane philosophy and would collaborate with her over the next several decades to revolutionize the treatment of the insane.
Trenton State Hospital – I believe some parts of it are abandoned but it is still an active psychiatric hospital.
Culled from: Lunatic: The Rise and Fall of an American Asylum
Asylum Records Online
Ticehurst Hospital, built in 1792
Snoops like me will be happy to know that 19th and early 20th century records from England’s Ticehust House Hospital asylum are online. A lot of them are really boring (maintenance records, accounting, salaries, etc.) but keep looking and you’ll find some fascinating stuff in here (if you can read somewhat challenging cursive). For example:
Register of Mechanical Restraint and Seclusion
Patients’ Books
Post-Mortem Book 1896-1929
Case Records 1913-1917
And much, much more!