Reformer during the Civil War

Dorothea lynde dix was an army nurse, activist, teacher and a reformer during the civil war. She opened a school for kids. She was also known from helping the mentally ill during and after the war. She trained other women to be nurse. She went through a lot as a child. She grew up in a family where her mother was going through depression and her father was abusive. She did not want others to go through that as well. She began Sunday school class in the east Cambridge, Massachusetts imprison. She was stunned by the conditions she found there. There was no warmth, since authorities contended that mentally ill people couldn’t feel the cool and would consume themselves and the building in the event that they were given any wellspring of warmth. Dix went through a year visiting each prison in Massachusetts. She found that rationally sick were routinely secured away correctional facilities or in their families’ lofts. She composed letters of dissent and shock to the neighborhood specialists that were distributed in the nearby papers.

She did not like that fact that the mentally ill people were kept in prison where they were always beaten up. She though mentally ill people were seen as criminals because people were not that aware in the past. She stepped up to make sure they don’t go through what they go through. Dorothea did numerous investigations for the treatment and what causes it. She went through the following 40 years of her life archiving maltreatment of mental patients all through the united states. She effectively impelled administrative changes in 15 states and supervised the foundation of 32 mental healing centers. There were just 13 mental facilities when dix started her work in 1843, yet by 1880 there were 123. In 1844, she helped to establish therapeutic administers of the American foundation for the insane, a milestone association in the field of psychiatry. Dix did not bolster the ladies’ rights or abolitionist development and contended that it was tricky to ask our southern compatriots to break the obligations of the slave and offer him free while here we hold men in cells and chains and in detainment facilities then basically in light of the fact that their psyches are obscured. Dix likewise proposed changes in jail conditions in her 1845 book. A new hospital was built for the mentally ill after she made a report to the government. All what she did, helped create many new institutions across the united states and in Europe as well.

I chose to write about Dorotha dix because she is an inspiration to me. From what I have studied about her, she loved her job and she was passionate about it. I am planning on being a nurse and she inspires me to be a good nurse. The fact that nurses back then weren’t getting paid that much like now, but she still did so much without excepting anything in return. She was not getting paid, but she still worked as a nurse to the army. She put herself in their position and helped. 

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