Diary of Dorothea Dix

July 16, 1887

Dear Diary,

Today is just a day I felt like writing. I feel as if I can not breathe, as if the air from my lungs isn’t there. My stomach is in pain, as if I became plain. This disease feels like it’s been eating me away ever since I got it. When I got the disease I wasn’t thinking of myself. I was still concerned about the imprisoned mentally ill. Many people kept asking about it. Many people were very concerned, all but me.

It all started in when I began my teaching at the East Cambridge House of Correction. I started to teach there because I was doing good deeds for the church. The movement was called, “The Second Great Awakening.” When I first walked in I saw many things people shouldn’t see. The tortured woman chained to the walls just hanging there. My heart felt like it just fell to the floor and broke. I was to teach classes every Sunday, and every day I went to teach it felt like the first I time saw them over and over. It’s like my heart was also chained to the wall. Some would moan and come was cry in pain. After a year of teaching I finally decided to do something about it. So I travelled to Massachusetts to inspect the conditions of the insane asylums and prisons. When I would travel to a new place and enter a new prison or institution I would gather information about what happens in there and once I get all that I need I would go out to the public and speak to a crowd of maybe two to three hundred people. I travelled to many places and started a society that was for better treatment for the mentally ill.

Since the first visit to the Correction facility I thought of that as my motivation to help the imprisoned and mentally ill. I never fell in love with a person because helping people became my only love. I wasn’t really social even though I spoke to big crowds of people. I made many speeches about what happens to the people in the institutions or prisons. I met many interesting people like President Millard Fillmore and David Hothersall.

Most of the time I would enter an institution or a prison I would still be surprised no matter how many times I would see the sight of people hanging and naked in the cold, dark and dirty rooms that are sometimes crowded.

My coughing and pains have been getting worse through the years. Back then my sickness never really bothered me except for sometimes. Travelling has gotten harder for me to do. Lately, I get headaches and stomach pains. In 1881 I moved into the Trenton New Jersey Sate Hospital. That is one of the thirty two hospitals in North America, Europe and Japan that I established. I have lived in this apartment for about six years now. When I think back into my life I always think of the first day I learned how to read and write because that got my started with the teaching and if I never learned that I wouldn’t have visited the Corrections facility in Boston. Then I wouldn’t have helped the mentally ill people that were stuck in the prisons instead of the asylums.

I think I contributed too many things because of that first dream to become a teacher. I helped show that anyone, not just men, can start a society. I also helped about two thousand woman become nurses and help the Federal Government. I think my life has been extraordinary which is anything but ordinary. I went through the hardships and fights I had to do to get to this point now in my life. I will never regret what I did because what I did was something only a person with a courageous and big heart could do.

Sincerely,
Dorothea Dix