shing frequently with the military bureaucracy and occasionally ignoring administrative details. Yet army nursing care was markedly improved under herleadership.In 1841, when Dorothea Dix was nearly forty, she reached a turning point in her life. She found that most people who suffered from various illnesses lived in harsh conditions either at home, in prisons, or in poor houses. Dorothea Dix devoted the rest of her life to changing this; with single-minded fervor, she became the voice of the mad. To prove her point, she traveled around the state to document the horrible conditions facing the ill. She found people living in filth, chained up, and beaten. In one poor house, men, women, sane, and insane were thrown together in the cellar where one would not want to keep a dog. Angered by what she saw, she brought the matter to a local court. In January 1843, she delivered a lengthy and dramatic report to the statelegislature. With the support of several influential men, she succeeded in persuading the legislature to appropriate money to expand the state hospital forthe insane. Encouraged by her victory in Massachusetts, she took her crusade to other states, covering over 30,000 miles in three years of non-stop travel. In 1843, there were thirteen mental hospitals in the country; by 1880 there were 123, and Dorothea Dix played a direct role in founding 32 of them.This soft spoken yet autocratic crusader spent more than twenty years working for improved treatment of mentally ill patients and for better prisonconditions. Dorothea Dix has helped many people in many different ways throughout her life. With the reinforcement of Rachel Bakers theme that sickpeople must never become cases receiving only efficient treatment; they need love, Dorothea Dixs legacy lives on....
