Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,520

This is the grave of Dorothea Dix.

Born in 1802 in Hampden, Maine, Dix grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts after her parents moved there shortly after her birth. Her father was a Methodist preacher, which meant being on the road a good bit. He also sold books while he was on the road. Her mother was sickly. Both parents were massive drunks and her father was an abusive asshole to her mom, so in 1814, she was sent to her grandmother on her mother’s side, who was in fact wealthy. This proved to be key for young Dorothea. She started teaching school at the age of 14 (this is nuts to me) at a somewhat experimental school that emphasized good behavior as the key to education. She was evidently pretty good at this and in 1821, opened a school in Boston for rich kids that was successful, all the while teaching poor kids in her grandmother’s barn.

Dix did have some problems of her own though, mostly severe depression that often led to breakdowns and got in the way of her burgeoning career. There may have been other health problems too, but they may also have been related to the depression. In any case, for the next several years beginning in 1824 she was mostly homebound and instead of teaching, wrote devotional books for kids. Conversations on Common Things actually became something of a best seller for young girls. She also was obsessed with flowers and her 1829 book The Garland of Flora was one of the first two major books on American flowers in the U.S.

Dix was something of a seeker. She started her life as a Catholic, moved to Congregationalism, and ended up a Unitarian. As such a seeker, she got caught up in the reform movements of the pre-Civil War era. One of her biggest causes was the prison movement, which mostly meant pushing for solitary confinement, with the idea that criminals would consider their own crimes while having nothing else to do and come out repented and ready to move on. Let’s just say that these people were wrong-headed, as we know.

It took awhile, but Dix moved toward abolitionism too. She first saw slavery when she worked for William Ellery Channing as a tutor and governess for his family. They took a trip to St. Croix and took Dix along. There of course, she saw slavery in action. But she doesn’t seem to have made many connections between what she saw and larger social problems until she suffered another breakdown and went to England to recover. There, she met a bunch of social reformers, particularly William Rathbone, who allowed her to stay in his house. They introduced Dix to many people with many new ideas. This changed her life.

Dix returned to the U.S. in 1840 and dove into her new issue–care for the mentally ill. That was part of what she was exposed to in England. The mentally ill were usually just thrown in prison and it was a disaster. The prisons were old and disgusting and these poor people’s needs were just not taken care of at all. It wasn’t hard for Dix to get into this since she was already interested in prison reform. She did a survey of the conditions for the mentally ill in Massachusetts over the next year and this got the state legislature to pass a bill to significantly expand the state mental hospital in Worcester to handle more patients. Dix then took these ideas to other states, particularly New Jersey, where she did a similar survey in 1844 that got that state to create a modern mental institution. Over the next several years, she traveled to states around the nation, even in the South, to promote these ideas, generally with success. She almost got a national bill passed to set aside 10 million acres of public land to be used (i.e, sold or otherwise financially tapped) to fund the states building modern asylums. The bill actually passed both the House and Senate, but the utterly vile drunk Franklin Pierce vetoed it, saying that the federal government should have no authority over issues that the states can decide for themselves.

Dix nearly had another breakdown after Pierce’s veto and went back to Europe, where she worked on modern mental illness issues there and even met Pope Pius IX to push her ideas. The Pope was surprised but impressed that a woman and *gasp* a Protestant is what woke him up to the reality that many mentally ill Catholics were suffering.

Then in 1861, the South committed treason in defense of slavery. Now, at this time, nursing was a distinctly male profession, to the extent it was a profession at all. In a lot of hospitals, the nurses were men who were half-recovered and forced to work. They didn’t know what they were doing and it just cost more lives. Doctors absolutely did not want women in Civil War hospitals. They worried what women who do to morals and discipline. But the reality of the Civil War created new needs. In 1861, the Lincoln administration named Dix Superintendent of Army Nurses. She wasn’t the only one fighting for this job. Elizabeth Blackwell also wanted it very badly, so it is a sign that women generally were pushing for active roles in the war than previously allowed.

Dix took this job very seriously. To get a job as a nurse you had to be old and ugly. No, seriously. If you were a conventionally attractive woman by the standards of the time, Dix would send you home. No one under the age of 35 could serve period. She was determined to maintain the moral standards the doctors demanded, plus she worried that if she didn’t, the whole thing would blow up. She also refused to discriminate against Confederate prisoners. An injured person was an injured person, period. Army doctors hated her and everything about having women around. Dix would also fire women who somehow found their way into the hospitals who she didn’t personally train (this shouldn’t surprise you, the more you learn about governance in the Civil War, the more you know how utterly half-assed it was, or in the case of the Confederacy, eighth-assed). Dix was not too easy to get along with and over time, she was pushed out. Once women were accepted or at least tolerated in the hospitals, women such as Clara Barton and Mary Edwards Walker were a lot easier to work with. Dix resigned her position shortly after the war and actually considered her Civil War work a complete failure, but I think that’s way overstated. No, it wasn’t easy and no, she wasn’t so easy to work with either, but she accomplished an absolute ton and shoved a big door open for women. Moreover, no one questioned her dedication to the job.

Dix spent her last two decades back on the mental illness and prison reform circuit. Interestingly, in 1881, with her health failing, she moved into the facility in New Jersey she lobbied to get built. She spent the last six years of her life living in a suite in the hospital, as her health made it too hard for her to travel. But she was pretty active until the end, which came in 1887. She was 85 years old.

Dorothea Dix is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit other key figures in women and the medical profession, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Elizabeth Blackwell is in Scotland, so you know, if you are feeling jolly and rich this new year…..but more realistically, Mary Edwards Walker is in Oswego, New York and Patricia Goldman-Rakic is in New Haven, Connecticut. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

By the way, I wrote a mere 250 grave posts in 2023! That’s a lot of graves!!! Here’s to a bunch more in 2024!