Episode Details

Dorothea Dix was born in Maine in 1802 to an abusive, alcoholic preacher father and an ailing mother, and at 12 was sent to her wealthy grandmother in Boston. She began teaching at 14, ran a charity school in her grandmother's barn, and wrote children's books and a dictionary of flowers before a breakdown in 1836 sent her to England, where Quaker reformers introduced her to the data driven lunacy reform movement.

In 1841, teaching Sunday school at the East Cambridge jail, she found mentally ill women in a freezing basement. She spent 18 months documenting conditions across Massachusetts, then traveled more than 10,000 miles by stagecoach lobbying states, using a former New Jersey lawmaker found in a basement to win the New Jersey State Hospital. Her bill to fund care with 10 million acres of federal land passed Congress but was vetoed by Franklin Pierce in 1854. As superintendent of Army nurses in the Civil War she clashed with doctors and lost her authority, but she is credited with founding 32 mental hospitals.

• Many towns auctioned the care of mentally ill residents to the lowest bidder, rewarding neglect.
• In North Carolina, a legislator's dying wife asked lawmakers to reconsider Dix's bill, and it passed.
• In Rome, her findings led Pope Pius IX to inspect local asylums and order reforms.
• On Sable Island she helped rescue 180 people from a shipwreck and later secured new lifesaving equipment.
• She required nurses to be 35 to 50 and plain looking, and distrusted the Catholic sisters serving as nurses.