With the start of the Civil War and President Abraham
Lincoln’s call for a 75,000 volunteer militia,
Dorothea Dix felt compelled to go to Washington
in the spring of 1861 to offer her services to the
surgeon-general. Dix had earned a national reputation
as a reformer for her efforts to improve the institutional
care of the mentally ill. An admirer of Florence
Nightingale, Dix modeled herself on the young British
nurse, whose humanitarian administrations in the
Crimean War won her international acclaim. One of
the first things Dix did after her arrival in the
capital was to make arrangements for a black dress
to be made for her, imitative of her heroine. This
would be the trademark of both women. Dix won an
appointment as superintendent of women nurses, a
title she would cling to without salary for the
next five years. Dix was a confirmed spinster on
the brink of sixty, dour in temperament, disciplined
in her work, and totally dedicated to the task at
hand—the management and placement of all women
nurses who volunteered their services in the government
hospitals. The qualifications she set for admission
into her ranks were harsh even by the standards
of her day. “All nurses are required to be
plain looking women. Their dresses must be brown
or black, with no bows, no curls, no jewelry, and
no hoop-skirts.” And she would consider no
woman, accomplished or homely, under thirty.
Predictably, Dix made herself unpopular with
many of her nurses. She had trouble relating to
them on a human level. Yet their complaints were
a mere whisper to the roar of many doctors in
the medical corps, who resented the intrusions
of women in what was then an exclusively male
field. A reorganization of the medical department
in 1862 put in place a new surgeon-general, who
would ultimately curtail Dix’s authority
and the autonomy she demanded. Her independence
is what compromised her war service the most,
as noted by diarist George Templeton Strong, treasurer
of the Sanitary Commission, when he wrote, “She
is energetic, benevolent, unselfish, and a mild
case of monomania. Working on her own hook, she
does good, but no one can cooperate with her,
for she belongs to the class of comets and can
be subdued into relations with no system whatever.”
In memory of Dorothea Dix’s pioneering efforts
to improve conditions for the mentally ill, this
portrait was commissioned by St. Elizabeth’s
Hospital in Washington, D. C., an institution
founded by Dix. The portrait hung for years upon
the hospital’s walls and was transferred
to the National Portrait Gallery in 1997, in the
hopes that it might receive greater visibility.
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