Dorothea Dix's Legacy
Accomplishments: She founded 32 hospitals for the mentally ill, created 15 schools for the feeble minded and also helped create schools to train nurses to deal with mentally ill. She also created a school for the blind. She also helped establish libraries in prisons, mental hospitals and other institutions. Dorothea Dix is considered to be, "the most effective advocate of humanitarian reform in American mental institutions during the nineteenth century". Her efforts were an indirect inspiration for the building of many additional institutions for the mentally ill. Not only did Dix reform the treatment in America, she also went to Europe and did the same thing there.When Dorothea Dix was 73, she watched the first class of nurses especially trained to care for the insane graduate from "her" hospital, the New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton New Jersey. She spent her last years living in a private apartment there, writing letters from her bed defending those who could not defend themselves. She died in 1887, and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her epitaph read, "She was the most useful and distinguished woman America has yet produced."