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Canadian Review of American Studies Volume 23, Number 3, Spring 1993, pp. 149-175 Dorothea Dix and the English Origins of the American Asylum Movement David L. Gollaher 149 In January 1843, Dorothea Lynde Dix, an obscure, middle-aged Boston spinster, known, if at all, as a schoolteacher and sometime author of religious books, submitted a sensational petition to the Massachusetts General Court. In its pages she claimed to expose the appalling condition of pauper lunatics throughout the state, county by county, town by town. "I proceed, Gentlemen," she announced, "briefly to call your attention to the present state of Insane Persons confined within this Commonwealth, in cages, closets, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience!" (Dix,Memorial, 1843,4). These words are from the opening of Dix's Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts, long recognized as the touchstone of the American asylummovement, and among the most powerful documents ever written in the history of American social reform. Samuel Gridley Howe, who had just the month before won a seat in the lower house of the assembly, admiringly likened its impact to a discharge of "redhot shot into the very hearts of the people" (Howe to Dix, n.d./January/ 1843, as quoted in Tiffany 1890, 89). By personalizing the plight of the insane, Dix moved people empathetically to respond; and where the blame lay with inept or corrupt officials, she did not hesitate to point it out. Almost from the day her pamphlet appeared , it came to be seen as one of those rare utterances that shock the collective conscience into a new way of seeing the world, in this case promoting a revolution in th~ perception and treatment of insanity. The Me- 150 Canadian Review of American Studies morialis a work of great force-a stirring call on behalf of the pauper insane to stop the abuses of the state's haphazard community-based approach to social welfare. Eloquent and impassioned, it defined the moral basis of lunacy reform for the rest of the nineteenth century. The Memorialis also a strange document, distinctive in the literature of Jacksonian reform. That it was written by a woman with little background in humanitarian endeavours, no training in medicine, and no experience in politics makes it all the more remarkable. What suddenly inspired Dix at age forty to take up the cause of the insane? What were the intellectual sources and psychologicalbasisof her convictions and behaviour? And why, from the outset, did she move beyond the conventional boundaries of female associations and collective reform to mount a personal assault on government itself? Curiously enough, the answers to these questions are encompassed neither by the modern historiography of the asylum nor by the larger body of scholarship on antebellum reform. To Dix's contemporaries, it would have seemed absurd that anyone might endeavour to explain "the discovery of the asylum" without taking into account the most prominent lunacy reformer of the age. Yet this is exactly what has happened, not just in one book but in the entire scholarly debate about the meaning of the asylum.1 This is scarcely a trivial oversight. For restoring Dorothea Dix to her proper place adds an important dimension that has been missing from current understanding of the antebellum asylum movement, particularly its ideologicalpower. Contrary to expectations, Dix's obsession with madness, her ideal of an institutional cure for insanity, her method of investigation and approach to legislativeaction and, above all, her firm conviction that it wasthe duty of government to provide for its most unfortunate citizens-all these were products of her experience not in America, but in England. Before proceeding, it is worth mentioning some of the reasons why Dix, long enshrined as one of the "great ladies" of the nineteenth century (her dour likeness adorning a penny postage stamp), has received so little attention from scholars in any field of history. That she resisted popular exaltation and deplored publicity;2 that she was a woman who lacked official standing either in government or in the medicalprofession, and thus tended to be marginalized as a mere lobbyist or popularizer rather than respected David L. Gallaher/ 151 as a person...

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