Dorothea Dix

Dix was teaching a Sunday class in a Massachusetts jail in 1841 when she found women with mental illness locked in an unheated room, and was told they did not feel the cold. She spent the next two years visiting every jail, workhouse and almshouse in the state, writing down what she saw with dates and places, and then presented the whole document to the legislature: people chained in cellars, kept naked in pens, beaten into obedience. The report was too specific to argue with, and the state voted funds for a hospital.

She repeated the method across the country and abroad, and is credited with founding or enlarging some thirty asylums in the United States and influencing reform in Britain, France and Japan. Her one great defeat was a bill setting aside federal land to endow care for the mentally ill, passed by both houses and vetoed in 1854 on the grounds that welfare was no business of the federal government. In the Civil War she served as superintendent of army nurses. She died at eighty-five in a hospital she had founded, and is buried at Mount Auburn under a stone bearing only her name.