Thomas J. Brown (Author of Dorothea Dix: The New England Reformer) http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/hist/faculty/brown.

html

Student Conducted Interview: 1. How do you think the growing spirit of activism and personal rights within Dorothea's time period influenced her to uphold responsibility and lead her reform movement? Agree or disagree and to what effect? I dont think personal rights were a big part of the context for Dixs career, but I certainly think that the broader spirit of activism that characterized America in the 1830s and early 1840s was crucial. The title of my biography Dorothea Dix, New England Reformer, is an allusion to Ralph Waldo Emersons essay New England Reformers, which is one of the most thoughtful commentaries on this tendency of the times. 2. What connections have you made as a historian, between Dorothea's Asylum movement and simultaneous reform movements? Similarities and differences? Reform movements shared some common features but also varied widely. Some were radical, like abolitionism or the call for womens suffrage. Some were much more conservative, like the temperance movement. Dixs interest in asylums connected to a broad set of reforms focused on institutions, which also included public schools, facilities for the disabled, and prisons. Although Dix liked to think of herself as nonpolitical, promotion of these was a big part of the agenda of the Whig party. 3. Dorothea Dix once said " I cannot adopt description of the condition of the insane secondarily; What I assert for fact, I must see for myself," In what way did witnessing first hand the treatment of the mentally ill effect Dorothea's crusade to better their lives?

Dix realized that an important part of her political effectiveness was the extent to which she personified sympathy for the insane, which called for her to report on her direct contact with them. That quotation comes from her very first memorial. It wasnt always possible for her to apply the same methods as her career expanded, though she generally tried to do so as much as she could. 4. What do you think was Dorothea's greatest opposition in her movement? Dixs campaign advanced a Whig vision of society, so her main opponents were Democrats. That was true on the state level, where the Democrats were the party that favored less government spending, and it was also true on the federal level, where the Whigs looked to sale of public lands as a resource for federal initiatives (like Dixs bill) while Democrats favored making them less expensive for settlers. In the later stages of Dixs career, an important form of opposition within the medical community was that some doctors had different ideas of how to treat the mentally ill. 5. What are your opinions on Dorothea's legacy? What is her longstanding effect on society today? Do you recognize her as a great american reformist, or is she forgotten?

I dont think she is forgotten. The theme of National History Day changes every year, but I almost always hear from a few students around the country who are working on her. She is in every American history textbook. I do think that she is not well understood. Her ideas about treatment of the insane were not dramatically original for the early 1840s. What was important about her asylum crusade was that she was a woman working through politics to turn those ideas into legislation and institutions.

More original were the ideas about nursing that she tried to implement in the Civil War. She got some of those ideas from her experience with mental hospitals and some of those ideas from Florence Nightingale. Dixs wartime experience was disastrous, but the defeat of her ideas was in some ways unfortunate and even tragic.

To put it another way, Dix was less important for what she did than for what she was. Mental hospitals and nursing probably would have turned out roughly the same if she had never lived. But she was a national heroine who became a symbol of antebellum American ideals, and whom the country rejected in the Civil War. She didnt change during that periodshe showed how the United States did.