Dorothea Dix's Memorial to the Massachusetts legislature

At Saugus on 24 December, with the thermometer below zero, Dorothea Dix was shown into the poorhouse master's family room, its walls hung with handcuffs and chains. Of the 13 paupers, she asked to see an insane woman, was refused, and pressed until the master gave way. Visits like this one, town after town, filled the memorial she sent to the Massachusetts legislature in January 1843.

Dix came before the legislators unsolicited. She wrote that about two years earlier she had begun visiting prisons and almshouses near Boston and had found insane persons and "idiots," in the language of the day, housed with criminals and paupers, to the harm of all. She wrote that duty had overruled her usual idea of what was womanly, and she named towns and cases, since cold facts, she said, required it.

The list ran across the state. In Medford one person was chained and another had spent 17 years in a close stall. In Pepperell one was often chained hand and foot, and in Barnstable four women were kept in pens and stalls. The almshouse at Danvers held 56 to 60 inmates, one insane person always in close confinement. The prisons at Ipswich and Cambridge each held more than twenty of them. Only prompt and vigorous legislation, she told the legislators, could remedy it.

Munroe and Francis printed the memorial in Boston, and demand for copies led to a reprint, to which Dix added that she believed similar cases could be found in other states. Massachusetts then had one state hospital for the insane, at Worcester, opened in 1833. An 1848 legislative study, which the National Park Service traces to the memorial, found Worcester badly overcrowded. In 1851 the state authorized a second asylum at Taunton, with wings for 250 patients on the plan of the Pennsylvania physician Thomas Kirkbride.