Dorothea Dix

Dorothea Lynde Dix was born on 4 April 1802 in Hampden, Maine, then part of Massachusetts. Escaping an unhappy home, she lived with her grandmother in Boston and became a schoolteacher and writer of books for children. In 1841 she began teaching a Sunday school class for women in the jail at East Cambridge, Massachusetts, and found mentally ill prisoners kept in unheated cells. She then visited jails and almshouses across the state and in 1843 presented a Memorial to the Massachusetts legislature describing people confined 'in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens', which led to the enlargement of the state hospital at Worcester. Over the next decades she travelled thousands of miles, gathering evidence and persuading legislatures in many states to found or expand hospitals for the insane. A bill she championed to set aside federal land for their support passed Congress but was vetoed by President Franklin Pierce in 1854. In the Civil War she served as Superintendent of Army Nurses for the Union. She died on 17 July 1887 in the New Jersey state hospital at Trenton, which she had helped found.

Faith: Raised Catholic and later in Congregationalism, she became a Unitarian. Source: Wikipedia

See also: Philippe Pinel · Samuel Tuke · Clara Barton