Dorothea Dix: Advocate for Mental Health Care Margaret Muckenhoupt OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Dorothea Dix Advocate for Mental Health Care Image Not Available OXFORD PORTRAITS Dorothea Dix Advocate for Mental Health Care Margaret Muckenhoupt 1 To my husband, Scott, and to Ken Robey, the best boss I ever had. 1 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Copyright © 2003 by Margaret Muckenhoupt Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Layout & Design: Greg Wozney Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Muckenhoupt, Margaret. Dorothea Dix : champion for the mentally ill / Margaret Muckenhoupt. p. cm. — (Oxford portraits) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-512921-0 (alk. paper) 1. Dix, Dorothea Lynde, 1802-1887–Juvenile literature. 2. Women social reformers—United States—Biography—Juvenile literature. 3. Mentally ill— Care—United States—History–Juvenile literature. [1. Dix, Dorothea Lynde, 1802-1887. 2. Reformers. 3. Mentally ill—Care—History. 4. Women— Biography.] I. Title. II. Series. HV28.D6 M83 2003 362.2'1'092--dc22 2003017874 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Cover: Portrait of Dorothea Dix by Samuel Bell Waugh, 1868 Frontis: Dorothea Dix, photographed in 1850 C ONTENTS 1 A GIRL BEGINS HER LONELY JOURNEY 7 2 “THE WORLD IS MY HOME” 15 Mother Explains a Factory 20 3 A TEACHER AND AN AUTHOR 25 Student Letters 28 “I Am Now Obliged to Refuse You the Desired Gratification” 36 4 BEGINNING THE GREAT WORK 40 Moral Treatment 47 5 “I SHALL BE OBLIGED TO SPEAK WITH GREAT PLAINNESS” 51 “I Tell What I Have Seen!” 53 Astonishing Tenacity of Life 60 6 MORAL TREATMENT FOR PRISONERS 67 “I Would Not Have the Officers Become Preachers” 69 7 A VETO AT HOME, A WELCOME IN EUROPE 81 8 A MODEL OF CHARITY FOR THE SOUTH 91 9 THE AMERICAN FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE 98 War Work 104 10 MORE TRAVEL, MORE BATTLES 111 AFTERWORD 117 CHRONOLOGY 120 FURTHER READING 122 INDEX 124 Image Not Available Dorothea Dix had this portrait painted when she was 20 years old. Her warm voice and chestnut- colored hair impressed all who met her. C H A P T E R 1 A G B H IRL EGINS ER L J ONELY OURNEY It is strange that nobody noticed the girl traveling by herself. In 1814, the road from Worcester to Boston, Massachusetts, passed through villages with blacksmiths, lawyers, and doc- tors. There were inns for travelers along the way. Plenty of merchandise was carried in and out of New England’s largest cities—wagons full of fish bound inland and flour riding out to the seaports. Still, no one stopped the girl, or asked where she was going, or helped her. Twelve-year-old Dorothea Dix made her first long journey alone. In her later years, Dix’s solitary travels were her life. She had no home, no fixed address at all. She made her reputation by constantly moving—and she kept changing places at least monthly until she went to her deathbed in New Jersey. Crisscrossing the United States, she single- handedly created most of the 19th-century public institutions east of the Mississippi River that served people with mental illness. She insisted that the government had an obligation to aid its most helpless citizens and that everyone—including prisoners, the poor, and people with mental illness—had a right to be treated with dignity. She was unyielding and effective, a symbol of women’s good works. 7 DOROTHEA DIX At the same time, Dorothea Dix’s life was a tale of arro- gance and grief. Born at a time when New England was rapidly developing from a patchwork of farms to a network of cities, Dix was always slightly out-of-step and behind the times. She did not even begin her most important social reform work until she was 39 years old. Her fierce indepen- dence allowed her to act boldly and travel all over the United States and Europe at a time when most women qui- etly kept to their homes, but it also kept her from listening to valuable advice. Her life’s greatest work—founding dozens of public hospitals for people with mental illnesses— was an enormous, selfless gift to her country. But in the end, Dix inadvertently created almost as much suffering for those patients as she relieved. Dorothea Dix’s family history was complicated by money, ambition, and battles over religion. Her grandfather, Elijah Dix, was a proud, bad-tempered man. Born in 1747, he built a successful medical practice in Worcester, a city 40 miles west of Boston. Aggressive and public-spirited, he organized dozens of plans for improving his town, from planting shade trees and founding a fire company to build- ing the Worcester and Boston Turnpike. Elijah Dix was too ambitious to limit himself to curing Worcester’s ills. After the Revolutionary War, he sailed to Europe to visit a business partner who had supported the British and then escaped to England. Dix returned with medical supplies and European contacts for trade. He became rich by importing medicines and scientific instruments, and by 1795, Elijah Dix had enough money to build a mansion in Boston for his wife, Dorothy, and his three children. The family was not quite in the social or financial posi- tion to live on Beacon Hill, Boston’s most exclusive neigh- borhood. Instead, they settled on a street where several wealthy rum merchants lived. These men made their for- tunes in the “triangular trade,” which involved shipping rum to Africa, slaves from Africa to the West Indies, and 8 A GIRL BEGINS HER LONELY JOURNEY Image Not Available rum and slaves from the West Indies to Boston. Forty years The wharves were later, Boston would become the hub of the movement to centers of trade in Boston. The owners of end slavery, but when Elijah Dix moved there, slavery was Yankee clipper ships, the basis for the fortunes of many prominent families. which docked in The Dixes’ brick mansion was called Orange Court, Boston, made fortunes. after its Orange Street address. Orange Court enclosed a garden—a sign of wealth in a crowded city—featuring the Dix Pear tree, bred by the Dixes. Newly rich merchants like Elijah Dix were thought to be in danger of loving money too much and developing hard hearts and narrow minds. The cure for the affliction of wealth was to raise pear trees. Rich men who raised fruit showed that they were rooted in their communities and had well-cultivated minds. By grow- ing pears, wealthy traders could ensure that their souls would be secure, even as their fortunes grew. 9