Dorothea Lynde Dix

A Boston schoolteacher and daughter of a preacher, Dorothea Dix, was visiting a jail to conduct religious services when she found that people with mental illness were confined there under inhumane conditions. For the next fifty years, she successfully advocated for several state legislatures to appropriate funds to build mental hospitals.

More than 32 state hospitals are credited to her efforts. She lived her final years as a guest at the Trenton State Hospital, an institution she helped found in 1848.

 

Painting by Samuel B. Waugh, 1868