William Tuke

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Dix, Dorothea (1802–1887), humanitarian, Union Superintendent of Women Nurses in the Civil War.Born in Hampden, Maine, Dix spent her life as a social activist, dedicated to improving the care and treatment of the insane. Beginning in 1841, she spearheaded the movement to establish asylums—as a social responsibility and financed by public funds—to replace the jails and alms houses in which the mentally impaired were confined. She was responsible, through her remarkable ability to influence people and legislatures, for the founding or enlarging of more than thirty mental hospitals in the United States and abroad.

With the outbreak of the Civil War she offered her services, gratis, to the secretary of war in April 1861. She was given the responsibility “to select and assign women nurses to general and permanent military hospitals.” Two months later, she was named Superintendent of Women Nurses.

Dix rented a house in Washington at her own expense, advertised nationally for volunteers, and weeded out those she thought physically or morally unsuitable. She accepted only nurses over thirty years of age and refused to allow Roman Catholic nuns or other religious orders to serve. Independent, autocratic, eccentric, working outside of established lines of authority and assuming powers beyond her responsibility, she antagonized the medical establishment. Military doctors, supported by the U.S. Sanitary Commission, resented her domineering intrusions. Although her authority was reaffirmed by Surgeon General William A. Hammond in July 1862, in October of that year Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton issued an order that gave the appointment, assignment, and control of nurses to hospital surgeons and medical directors. Dix was left without authority. She continued to work in the hospitals in the Washington area, however, and did not relinquish her title as superintendent until September 1866.

Dix returned to her interest in the insane. In 1881, ill, she accepted an apartment offered to her at the New Jersey State Hospital in Trenton, where she lived until her death.
[See also Sanitary Commission, U.S.]

Bibliography

Francis Tiffany , Life of Dorothea Lynde Dix, 1890.
David Gollaher , Voice for the Mad: The Life of Dorothea Dix, 1995.

David L. Cowen

Dix, Dorothea (1802–1887), asylum movement leader.Dorothea Dix was born in Hampden, Maine, the daughter of an alcoholic Methodist preacher who was the black sheep of a wealthy merchant family. In 1836–1837, her career as a schoolmistress thwarted by ill health, she suffered a nervous breakdown. Traveling to England seeking a cure, she encountered leading reformers, including the Quaker Samuel Tuke, head of the well‐known York Retreat for the mentally disordered. Returning to the United States, Dix in 1841–1842 undertook an exhaustive survey of the appalling treatment of Massachusetts's indigent insane, confined in jails and almshouses, often in chains. She was supported by prominent reformers and by the Unitarian leader William Ellery Channing, a close friend. In 1843, in response to her scathing report, the Massachusetts legislature appropriated funds to expand the state mental hospital in Worcester. This set the pattern for her successful advocacy of similar reforms in many states, from New York to Mississippi. She was now well‐known, but her long campaign (1847–1854) to win federal funding for state asylums for the mentally ill proved unsuccessful. When the Civil War began, Dix, inspired by the British heroine Florence Nightingale, sought to become America's supreme nurse. Appointed superintendent of army nurses, she proved a domineering, inept administrator and was gradually relieved of power. Dix also supported prison reform, but otherwise generally ignored the other reform movements of the day, including women's rights and antislavery. Yet her single‐minded focus allowed her to accomplish more in politics than any other woman of her era.
See also Alms Houses; Mental Illness; Prisons and Penitentiaries.

Bibliography

David Gollaher , Voice for the Mad: The Life of Dorothea Dix, 1995.
Thomas J. Brown , Dorothea Dix: New England Reformer, 1998.

David Gollaher

William Tuke 1732–1822, English merchant and philanthropist. He succeeded at an early age to the family business at York in wholesale tea and coffee. He is remembered as the chief founder of the York Retreat (opened 1796), an influential early institution for the intelligent and humane care of the insane. His son Henry Tuke, 1755–1814, was a cofounder of the retreat. Henry Tuke's son Samuel Tuke, 1784–1857, continued in the family business and interested himself in the conditions of the insane. His Description of the Retreat (1813) had great influence in reforming the treatment of insanity. Samuel Tuke's son James Hack Tuke, 1819–96, also entered the family business and aided in the management of the York Retreat. He long engaged in philanthropic aid to Ireland. His brother Daniel Hack Tuke, 1827–95, was an eminent physician whose study of insanity resulted in a valuable treatise, A Manual of Psychological Medicine (with J. C. Bucknill, 1858).