The dramatic story of America's Florence Nightingale, the woman who single-handed brought about a complete revolution in the care of the mentally sick.

Dorothea Dix was brought up in Boston by a wealthy grandmother who wanted the shy girl to become a social belle. Instead, she threw herself into teaching and writing with such compulsive force that in her middle thirties she became desperately ill. Sent to England to recover, she lived with Rathbones, famed humanitarians, and there she met the man who revolutionized her life, Samuel Tuke, grandson of the founder of the first humane institution ever built for the care of the mentally ill.

Returning to America, forbidden to ever work again at risk of her life, she visited Boston's East Cambridge Jail and was horrified by the terrible conditions existing there—and so began her life work.

Dorothea Dix established the concept "that the sick are the wards of the state". She worked ten years to try to get a Federal bill passed giving national aid to those needing mental care. She was assisted by America's most distinguished men—Horace Mann, Samuel Gridley Howe, Charles Sumner, John Greenlief Whittier.

During the Civil War she became Superintendent of Nurses for the Union Forces, serving the American army on the Potomac as Florence Nightingale had once served the British army in the Crimea. Elizabeth Blackwell, Clara Barton and Louisa May Alcott were among her volunteer nurses.

She died in 1878 in an apartment built for her high under the eaves of the New Jersey State Hospital, the first state hospital built entirely through her efforts. Thanks to Dorothea Dix the world today recognizes the importance of trained personnel and the need for hospital care for the mentally ill.

From the book