Dorothea Dix Thesis

Dorothea Dix is an American social reformer with a huge impact of saving lives before and during The Civil War. In her early life, she opened a school for children including poor and neglected to help out on their reading and writing. Dix is more compassionate to teach the poor and neglected children, who can’t afford or able to make it to school, by coming to their houses because she felt the same connection during her childhood years under her strict and alcoholic father. Luckily her wealthy grandmother, Dorothea Lynde, took her in which makes Dix open the school and later take interest in help out the mentally poor that introduces the start of the asylums. Due to her poor health, Dorothea Dix ceased teaching students and move onward of researching the mentally ill. The reason why Dix chose to research the mentally ill is when Samuel Gridley Howe encourages her to work in East Cambridge to teach female prisoners with mental illness. Later on, she was researching in the Massachusetts she notices that the East Cambridge does not meet the needs of a mentally ill building and been treated in horrible conditions. She describe as, “present state of Insane Persons confined within this Commonwealth, in cages, closets, cellars, …show more content…
With that document published in 1843, it is one of the well-known papers that made asylums and prisons convert into well conditions services. Thomas Brown explain that, “Dix’s ‘Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts’ was one of the most remarkable documents of the era. Part legislative petition, part Unitarian sermon, part personal justification, the thirty-page petition transformed her study of prison and almshouse conditions into a fascinating exploration of American society,” (88). Dorothea Dix has put her experiences in visiting asylums into her writing and here is a part in her