If County Jails must be resorted to for security against the dangerous
propensities of madmen, let such use of prison‐rooms and dungeons be
but temporary. It is not long since I noticed in a Newspaper, published
near the borders or this State, the following paragraph: “It is our fate,”
writes the Editor, “to be located opposite the County Jail, in which are
now confined four miserable creatures bereft of the God‐like attribute
of reason: two of them females; and our feelings are daily excited by
sounds of woe, that would harrow up the hardest soul. It is horrible
that for the sake of a few thousand dollars the wailings of the wretched
should be suffered to issue from the gloomy walls of our jails without
pity and without relief. Were our law‐makers doomed to listen for a
single hour each day to the clanking of chains, and the piercing shrieks
of these forlorn wretches, relief would surely follow, and the character
of our State would be rescued from the foul blot that now dishonors it.”
In nearly every jail in North Carolina, have the insane at different times,
and in periods varying in duration, been grievous sufferers. In Halifax
County, several years since, a maniac was confined in the jail; shut in
the dungeon, and chained there. The jail was set on fire by other
prisoners: the keeper, as he told me, heard frantic shrieks and cries of
the madman, and “might have saved him as well as not, but his noise
was a common thing he was used to it, and thought nothing out of the
way was the case.” The alarm of fire was finally spread; the jailer
hastened to the prison: it was now too late; every effort, and
no exertions were spared, to save the agonized creature, was unavailing.
He perished in agony, and amidst tortures no pen can describe.…
Dix Document.notebook
2
December 15, 2013
In illustration of the blessing and benefit of Hospital care in cases long
and most cruelly neglected, I adduce the following examples recorded by
Dr. Hill, and corresponding with many cases under my own immediate
observation since 1840. “Two patients,” writes the Dr. “were brought to
me in 1836, who had been confined in a poor‐house between eighteen
and twenty years. During this period they had not known liberty. They
had been chained day and night to their bedsteads, and kept in a state so
filthy that it was sickening to go near them. — They were usually
restrained by the strait‐waistcoat, and with collars round their necks, the
collars being fastened with chains or straps to the upper part of the
bedstead, to prevent, it was said their tearing their clothes. The feet were
fastened with iron leg‐locks and chains. One poor creature was so wholly
disabled by this confinement, that it was necessary for the attendants to
bear her in their arms from place to place after she was brought to the
Hospital; she shortly acquired good habits, and was long usefully
employed in the sewing‐room. The other was more difficult of
management but soon gained cleanly habits, and now occupies herself in
knitting and sewing, and that, after having been treated for years like the
lowest brute. Another case was brought in chains, highly excited; five
persons attended her; in six days all restraints were removed; and she
walked with her nurse, in the patients’ gallery. In June, she was
discharged from the wards quite cured, and engaged as assistant in the
kitchen.…
Dix, Dorthea. “Memorial Soliciting a State Hospital for the Protection and Cure of the Insane.” In The General Assembly of North Carolina. 1848. Pgs 8-9.
Dorthea Dix believed that patients in the hospitals for the mentally insane were treated unfairly in harsh conditions. This letter to the Assembly was written to inform people how these patients were being treated. Dorthea Dix was born on April 4, 1802 in Hampden, Maine. She grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts and also lived in Boston with her grandmother. Her father was abusive and her family was alcoholic. Her father, Joseph Dix, was an itinerant worker and her mother was Mary Bigelow. Dorthea had two younger siblings. She was the Superintendent of Army Nurses during the Civil War, so she had medical experience. Dix was a well-known writer of books of devotion and children stories. She wrote Conversations on Common Things in 1824 and had no reputation of lying in her writing. In 1836 she went to England to try to increase her health. In England she was involved in the British lunacy reform movement, which investigated asylums and madhouses for the House of Commons. This letter was from the perspective of an investigator, no the actual patients in these hospitals. The letter was written about seven or eight years after Dix investigated the mental hospitals in Massachusetts, which was not too long after the actual investigation. This letter teaches us that Dorthea Dix thought the way the mentally insane patients were treated in hospitals were inhumane. Dr. Hill observed two patients that “Were usually restrained by the strait‐waistcoat, and with collars round their necks, the collars being fastened with chains or straps to the upper part of the bedstead, to prevent, it was said their tearing their clothes.” He also noticed, “The feet were fastened with iron leg‐locks and chains.” Dix read in a newspaper article, “It is horrible that for the sake of a few thousand dollars the wailings of the wretched should be suffered to issue from the gloomy walls of our jails without pity and without relief.” Dix is trying to convince the readers that the patients of the mental hospitals suffered by displaying the words “horrible,” “suffered,” “gloomy,” “without pity and without relief” and “wailings.” All of these words are scary and depressing words. She wants to prove that these hospitals were scary and depressing.
(Ms. Gallagher,
I know that the every line except for the first line of the bibliography should be indented, although Blogger would not let me format it that way. Thank you!)
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