Dorothea Dix

became the Unions Superintendent of Female Nurses during the Civil War.

She left home at the age of twelve to live with her aunt and uncle. She was

only fourteen when she opened her first school for young children in 1816.

Then for the next twenty years she combined her skills of teaching, writing textbooks, poetry and religious tracts for young readers. In 1841 when she was nearly forty years old she reached a turning point in her life. She realized that there were many people in the jail that committed only one crime. Then she began searching each jail, poorhouse, and house correction in Massachusetts. In 1843 she wrote a report to the state legislature. She had men supporting her though everything. This expanded the state hospital for the insane at Worcester. In 1843 there were thirteen mental hospitals and by 1880 there were one hundred and twenty three. Dorothea had played a direct role in founding thirty-two of them. Her being the Superintendent of Women Nurses for the union was not a great success. She spent her last years in the guest quarters of a state hospital she had helped found thirty-five years before she died in 1887 at the age of eighty-five.

By: Tara Braaten

8-2