re of North Carolina:I am the hope of the poor crazed beings who pine in cells and stalls and cages and waste-rooms... of hundreds of wailing, suffering creatures hidden in your private dwellings and in pens and in cabins, (www.angelfire.com, 4).Eventually tired of state-by-state campaigns, she worked on Federal reform (The Readers Companion to American History, 4). In 1948, she appealed to the Federal Government for 10 million acres for the use by the insane, deaf and dumb. The bill was passed in February of 1851 by the Senate. Congress then adjourned, so they voted on it again and it passed. Unfortunately, it was vetoed by President Pierce (Thinkquest, 13).Dorothea Dix started volunteering as a nurse for the Union army after the attack on Fort Sumter and was placed in charge of all women nurses working in army hospitals (www.civilwarhome.com, 3). At the time of the Civil War, Dorothea had spent more than twenty years caring for the mentally ill (www.civilwarhome.com, 2). She ultimately became the Union Superintendent of female nurses during the Civil War (www.civilwarhome.com, 1). She court marshaled every doctor she found drunk or disorderly (Thinkquest, 14). And Dix only accepted nursing applicants between the ages of thirty and fifty who were plain-looking, didnt wear hoops or jewelry, and wore plain black or brown skirts (www.civilwarhome.com, 4). She was known as Dragon Dix, because of her constant clashes with military bureaucracy and occasionally ignoring administrative detail (www.civilwarhome.com, 5). A total of over 3,000 women nurses served in the Union army (www.civilwarhome.com, 6).In 1843, there were thirteen mental hospitals in the country; by 1880, there were 123. Dix played a direct role in erecting thirty-two of them and improving hundreds of other hospitals (www.mfh.org, 5). Just before her death, Dorothea Dix, also known as The Voice of the Mad, wrote to friend and poet, John Greenleaf Whittier:I have a...
