How It All Started
When Dorothea returned to Boston she was told someone was needed to read the Bible Sundays to a group of women in jail, "She told him she would go herself" (Stoddard 140). Dorothea went to the jail to read and saw the harsh, painful, and cruel treatment of the insane. She knew she must do something. One night after a reading she asked the jailer's wife to show her the vault. As she read her notebooks she saw how horrible these people felt one phrase that stuck in her head was, "and yet he never freezes" (Stoddard 140).
Dorothea then went to Dr. Channing for advice. He told her to go speak to three important people. When one recommend she needed someone to go investigate she said, "I intend to make the survey myself" (Stoddard 141). For the next eighteen months Dorothea at her own expense visited over five hundred jails, workhouses, and almshouses all the way from the Berkshires to Cape Cod. The things she saw were eye-wrenching. In her reports there are descriptions of her seeing, arms and legs pinioned, bodies cut with whips, necks bowed beneath fetters, people with their feet frozen off, etc. (Stoddard 141).
Her memorial to the people read, "Gentlemen of Massachusetts: I have come to present you the strong claims of suffering humanity. I come as the advocate of the helpless, forgotten, insane men and women held in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens; chained, naked, beaten with rods and lashed into obedience...." (Stoddard 141). When she first sent this is all the owners of the jails and almshouses denied her memorial. Dix wrote multiple articles and sent them in to multiple newspapers trying to spread the world of the hash punishment of these poor people.
The impact this left was, a bill was passed in Worecester in 1843. This bill said the there would be two-hundred thousand dollars given to build an addition to a hospital for the insane at Worecester.
Dorothea then went to Dr. Channing for advice. He told her to go speak to three important people. When one recommend she needed someone to go investigate she said, "I intend to make the survey myself" (Stoddard 141). For the next eighteen months Dorothea at her own expense visited over five hundred jails, workhouses, and almshouses all the way from the Berkshires to Cape Cod. The things she saw were eye-wrenching. In her reports there are descriptions of her seeing, arms and legs pinioned, bodies cut with whips, necks bowed beneath fetters, people with their feet frozen off, etc. (Stoddard 141).
Her memorial to the people read, "Gentlemen of Massachusetts: I have come to present you the strong claims of suffering humanity. I come as the advocate of the helpless, forgotten, insane men and women held in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens; chained, naked, beaten with rods and lashed into obedience...." (Stoddard 141). When she first sent this is all the owners of the jails and almshouses denied her memorial. Dix wrote multiple articles and sent them in to multiple newspapers trying to spread the world of the hash punishment of these poor people.
The impact this left was, a bill was passed in Worecester in 1843. This bill said the there would be two-hundred thousand dollars given to build an addition to a hospital for the insane at Worecester.