Book Description

On Behalf of the Insane Poor was originally published in 1973. These are selected historical reports on behalf of the insane poor. In Dorothea Lynde Dix?s 1843 plea to the Massachusetts Legislature she said, ---I tell what I have seen ---painful and shocking as the details often are --- that from them you may feel more deeply the imperative obligation which lies upon you to prevent the possibility of a repetition or continuance of such outrages upon humanity. I proceed, Gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state "in behalf of the insane poor confined within the Commonwealth in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens; chained, naked, beaten with rods and lashed into obedience." Dorothea Dix was a tireless and effective mental health reformer at a time when the mentally ill were treated as delinquents. She was born in Maine (1802), after the age of 12 she lived with her grandmother and began teaching school at the age of 14. She published many books for children, which were outstanding .In 1841, hearing that a Sunday-school teacher was needed in the East Cambridge House of Correction, she volunteered to teach a class of twenty women who were criminals and drunkards beginning her crusade for mental health reform.When the Civil War started, she volunteered her services and was subsequently appointed superintendent of the army nurses. What Florence Nightingale was to the Crimean War, the same was Dorothea Dix to the Union Army during the Civil War.Miss Dix returned to the Trenton State Hospital, which she considered her home for the last six years of her life. She died there July 18, 1887 at age of 85 and is buried in Cambridge, Massachusetts.