Dorothea Dix spent 40 years of her life working to make life better for homeless and mentally challenged people. She was a leader in telling the story of the unfortunate people of the world. It is said that few people have changed the world as much as Dorothea Dix.

Dorothea was born in 1802 in Hampden, Maine. At that time Maine was a territory of Massachusetts. She was not close to her parents. Her mother may have been mentally challenged and her father was a strict minister who was not a loving parent. By the age of ten she ran away and went to live with her rich grandmother in Massachusetts. Her grandmother was very stern and Dorothea did not have a happy childhood. Later in life she would not talk much about her younger years.

She started teaching in Worchester at the age of 15 and soon opened a school for "young girls" in the family mansion. At the age of 22 she got tuberculosis and by the time she was 34 had a nervous breakdown. After she got better, she travel around America and Europe. When she was 39 she visited a women's prison and it was there that she discovered what she wanted to do with her life. She wanted to help the people who were being treated so poorly by society.

She hated the way mentally handicapped people were treated. They were often placed in dirty and very crowded conditions and sometimes put into jail with criminals. Dorothea thought that this was wrong and decided to do something about it. She visited every poorhouse, prison, and mental asylum in Massachusetts and wrote a report to the government of the state. State officials were upset that she did this, but the people of the state were so upset by the conditions that they made sure that money was set away to improve the conditions for these poor people.

By 1848 she had traveled 60,000 miles around the country visiting prisons around the whole country. She reported to the conditions to the U.S. government in Washington. She made people in the country know how the mentally ill and homeless were being treated. Again there were people who did not want her to tell about these conditions.

After her work in the United States, she went to Europe and started again. She visited places all over Europe and made citizens there know how the mentally ill were being treated there. She even got the Pope to make a tour of some of the jails in Rome.

In 1860 when the Civil War broke out, Dorothea became Superintendent of the nurses. She made sure that the nurses were doing a good job of caring for the soldiers who were hurt in the fighting in this war. By this time she was very well known in the United States and around the world. When the war was over she raised money for a memorial to the soldiers who had fought in the war.

After the war Dorothea continued to work for the mentally challenged. She helped start 32 state hospitals to help them. She continued her work until the age of 80. She died at the age of 85.

Adams, Herb and Verde, Tom. Maine's Claim to Fame. Augusta: Maine Department of Education, date on publication not available.