Dix, Dorothea Lynde
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
Dorothea Lynde (1802-1887), an American teacher, writer, and philanthropist. She was born at Hampton, Maine, and died at Trenton, New Jersey . Miss Dix is one of the most useful women America has produced. She taught school in Worcester and in Boston. In 1830 she fell heir to property that enabled her to devote her life to the unfortunate. In 1834 Miss Dix went abroad to study English and European methods of caring for criminals, lunatics, and paupers. She was urgent in advocacy of hospitals, of clean and well-kept poorhouses, of institutions for the deaf, dumb, and blind, and of orphan asylums. Her greatest work, however, lay in the direction of persuading lawmakers to provide public asylums for the insane. In this work she visited many states and addressed legislatures. Over thirty insane asylums were established. Through her efforts Congress passed a bill setting aside 10,000,000 acres of land for the maintenance of asylums for pauper lunatics, but President Pierce vetoed the measure. One result of a trip to Europe was the publication in 1845 of Prisons and Prison Discipline. She wrote also a number of books for children. During the Civil War Miss Dix superintended the hospital nurses of the Federal service. In 1903 an effort was made to secure a national appropriation of $10,000 for the erection of a suitable memorial at her birthplace. The chairman of the Congressional committee wrote, "Miss Dix occupies a conspicuous place in history as a philanthropist. Certainly no other woman in modern times has done more to earn the gratitude of the people of this country than this self-sacrificing and devoted woman."
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 account is accurate in substance, though her birthplace was Hampden, not Hampton, Maine, and she died in 1887 in an apartment at the New Jersey state hospital in Trenton that she herself had helped found. What has changed is the fate of her life's work: the public asylums she persuaded some thirty state legislatures to build were, from the 1950s onward, emptied by antipsychotic drugs, court rulings and the federal Community Mental Health Act of 1963, and most have since closed or shrunk to a fraction of their old size. Critics now argue that deinstitutionalization returned the mentally ill to the jails and streets where Dix first found them in the 1840s, which makes her campaign newly topical rather than merely historical. Her reputation has also been complicated by later biographers, who read her as a shrewd and sometimes autocratic lobbyist rather than only the self-sacrificing saint of the congressional tribute quoted above.
Written for this edition, 2026.