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Early Life
She lived with her dad until she was 12. She left home to live with her grandmother in Boston in then with her aunt in Worcester, Massachusetts. Then at age 14 she began teaching school. -
Dix Mansion
Dorothea Dix returned to Boston and founded the Dix Mansion, a school for girls. She also founded a charity school that poor girls could attend for free. -
Textbooks
After she founded a few schools she began to write textbooks. Her most famous one being, Conversations on Common Things. -
Beginning of her interest mental illness
She began teaching Sunday school at East Cambridge Jail, a prison for women. This is where she discovered the awful treatment of the prisoners, particularly those with mental illnesses. She immediately went to court and secured an order to provide benefits for the prisoners. -
Founding mental illness hospitals
As she was touring the country she was documenting the conditions and treatment of patients, campaigning to establish humane asylums for the mentally ill and founding or adding additions to hospitals. She wanted to do this in Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Maryland, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina and North Carolina -
Improving prison conditions
She began traveling around the state to research the conditions in prisons and poorhouses, and crafted a document that was presented to the Massachusetts legislature. It ended up increasing the budget to expand the State Mental Hospital at Worcester. But she wasn't content so she started traveling outside of the state and around the country. -
Veto
She asked Congress to grant more than 12 million acres of land as a public funding to be used for the benefit of the mentally ill as well as the blind and deaf. Both houses of Congress approved the bill, but in 1854 it was vetoed by President Franklin Pierce. -
Going to Europe
When President Franklin Pierce vetoed the bill that she requested for land she went to Europe. When she was there she realized the big difference between countries. After the Pope IX heard her report he personally ordered construction of a new hospital for the mentally ill. -
The Civil War
When the Civil War broke out she volunteered and was named superintendent of nurses. She was responsible for setting up field hospitals and first-aid stations, recruiting nurses, managing supplies and setting up training programs. She was efficient and focused but many found her rigid, without the social skills that were necessary to navigate the military’s administration. -
Before death
After the war she went back to work on the mentally ill. But when she contracted malaria and couldn't travel very far but she still continued to write. She went to her hospital in Trenton, New Jersey that she had founded 40 years earlier.
