Dorothea Dix Remembered The Dorothea Dix Psychiatric Center

Dorothea Dix Remembered

The Dorothea Dix Psychiatric Center

by Charles Francis I n 1848 Hampden-born Dorothea Dix addressed the United States Congress. Her subject was one of the causes she devoted much of her life to, adequate funding for facilities and treatment for the insane poor. What Dix wanted from Congress was a federal land grant of 12,500,000 acres. The land was to be set aside as a public endowment to benefit not only the insane but the blind, deaf, and mute. While Congress did pass a bill in support of Dix’s request, it was vetoed by President Franklin Pierce.

Dorothea Dix did not give up on her quest for government funding, however. The diminutive social reformer — she weighed ninety-five pounds and

was a lifelong sufferer of tuberculosis — continued her lobbying of federal authorities. In 1854 her request was signed into law.

Dorothea Dix may just be Maine’s

most influential native. She is regarded by many as the most significant social reformer of the nineteenth century. While her renown centers on her work for psychiatric care, she is a member of the American Nursing Association’s Hall of Fame for recruiting more than two thousand women to work as nurses for the Union Army during the Civil War. North Carolina has a Dorothea Dix Hospital. The Unitarian Church, of which she was a member, recognizes her as one of the most significant Unitarians of all time. And these are just a few of her accolades. Unfortunately, Dix has been little remembered in her home state. Until recently, that is.

Until 2005 the only visible memo-

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rial to Dorothea Dix in Maine was a small park in her birthplace of Hampden. Then, in 2005 Bangor Mental Health Institute was renamed the Dorothea Dix Psychiatric Center. The name change was admittedly politically motivated. Bangor State Representative Sean Faircloth, known as a strong advocate for social reform, called for the name change “to elevate future debate on mental health issues.” Faircloth thought the use of Dix’s name would help call attention to the problems of Mainers facing mental health issues. For a wide range of reasons, the name change was long overdue.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Dorothea Dix was that she accomplished so much for the good of others when she herself suffered greatly in the way of physical illness. Her tuberculosis led to the loss of a lung and years of convalescence while she was still in her twenties. In her mid-thirties, recurring pulmonary hemorrhaging

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forced a return to a bedridden state. She was in her sixties when Secretary of War Simon Cameron made her the first Superintendent of Union Army Nurses. Even in her eighties — she died at eighty-five — Dix was a familiar figure at disaster sites. In her last years, she even took up a new cause, animal welfare. (She saw to it that water troughs were scattered around Boston for overworked and thirsty draft horses.) All of these things and many others Dix accomplished after having been born to what we would call a dysfunctional family.

Dorothea Lynde Dix was born in Hampden on April 4, 1802. By all accounts, her father was a drunk and her mother — at the best of times — apathetic. One story has it that she ran away from home at twelve to escape the horror in her family. Fortunately, she did have a doting grandfather, Dr. Elijah Dix.

Today, Elijah Dix’s name is preserved in Maine in Dixmont, which he owned a large portion of, and Dixfield, where he is buried. The elder Dix was a wealthy man who acted as his granddaughter’s father figure. Unfortunately, Dr. Dix died when Dorothea was seven. Dorothea’s first career was that of teacher. At the age of fourteen, she opened a private school in Worcester, Massachusetts for young women. Foreshadowing her work with the poor, she also taught those who could not afford the cost of the private school in separate evening sessions.

While little is made of it by Dix biographers, the most important constant in her life would seem to be Unitarianism, which in the nineteenth century stood in the forefront of a variety of educational and social movements. Dix numbered among her close friends the great Unitarian divine William Ellery Channing as well as such Unitarians as Samuel Gridley Howe, head of the Perkins School for the Blind, and his (cont. on page 18)

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wife Julia Ward Howe, who was noted for her abolitionist stands and as the composer of The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Ironically, Clara Barton, another Unitarian reformer and famous for her association with the American Red Cross, was her chief Washington nemesis during the Civil War.

It was William Ellery Channing who was indirectly responsible for Dix becoming a crusader for the welfare of the mentally ill. In 1836 Channing was responsible for Dix going to England for tuberculosis treatments. There she stayed with a Unitarian philanthropist named William Rathbone whose charities included the poor and destitute. While in England, Dix first saw the true horror of the then-current treatment of the mentally ill in the infamous Bedlam. Here, patients were chained in unheated and unlighted cells. Sometimes the incarceration lasted years. Rathbone’s charitable activities and her exposure to Bedlam were important factors in Dix’s (cont. from page 17)

own development as a reformer.

On her return to the United States in 1838, Dix threw herself into her work to better the conditions of the mentally ill. By 1848, when she appeared before Congress, she had been responsible in part or completely for the establishment of six new asylums as well as eighteen penitentiaries and five hundred poorhouses. In later years, she would influence similar developments in England, on the Continent, and even as far away as Japan.

Bangor Mental Health Institute once housed as many as four hundred inpatients. When the institution was renamed Dorothea Dix Psychiatric Center the number was only one hundred. The decline in inpatients in part reflected changes in the philosophy of dealing with the mentally troubled as well as state finances. Perhaps both will be reassessed in light of the renaming. Dorothea Dix would certainly work to this end should she still be alive.

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