How she got her education we hardly know, but she began teaching, as Clara Barton did, when she was fifteen years of age. And like Clara Barton she became a pioneer in certain forms of educational work. Dorothea Dix opened a school “for charitable and religious uses,” above her grandmother’s barn, and in time she inherited property which made her independent, so that she was able to devote herself to a life of philanthropy.
In 1837, being then thirty-five years of age, and encouraged by her pastor, Dr. Channing, in whose home she spent much of her time, she launched forth upon her career of devotion to the amelioration of the condition of convicts, lunatics, and paupers. In her work for the insane she was especially effective. She traveled in nearly all of the States of the Union, pleading for effective legislation to promote the establishment of asylums for the insane. Like Clara Barton she found an especially fruitful field of service in New Jersey; the Trenton Asylum was in a very real sense her creation. The pauper, the prisoner, and especially the insane of our whole land owe her memory a debt of lasting gratitude.
By 1861 her reputation was well established. She was then almost sixty years of age and had gained the well-merited confidence of the medical profession. She was on her way from Boston to Washington, and was spending a few days at the Trenton Asylum, when the Sixth Massachusetts was fired upon in Baltimore on April 19, 1861. Like Clara Barton she hastened immediately to the place of service. On the very next day she wrote to a friend: “I think my duty lies near military hospitals for the present. This need not be announced. I have reported myself and some nurses for free service at the War Department, and to the Surgeon-General.” Her offer was accepted with great heartiness and with ill-considered promptness. She was appointed “Superintendent of Female Nurses.” She was authorized “to select and assign female nurses to general or permanent military hospitals; they not to be employed without her sanction and approval except in case of urgent need.”
Whether the United States contained any woman better qualified to undertake such a task as this than Dorothea Dix may be questioned. Certainly none could have been found with more of experience or with a higher consecration. It was an impossible task for any one, and, while Miss Dix was possessed of some of the essential qualities, she did not possess them all. Her biographer very justly says:
The literal meaning, however, of such a commission as had thus been hastily bestowed on Miss Dix—applying, as it did to the women nurses of the military hospitals of the whole United States not in actual rebellion—was one which, in those early days of the war, no one so much as began to take in.... Such a commission—as the march of events was before long to prove—involved a sheer, practical impossibility. It implied, not a single-handed woman, nearly sixty and shattered in health, but immense organized departments at twenty different centers.”[8]
The War Department acted upon what must have appeared a wise impulse in turning this whole matter of women nurses over to the authority of a woman known in all the States—as Miss Dix was known—and possessing the confidence of the people of the whole country. But she was not only sixty years of age and predisposed to consumption, and at that time suffering from other ailments, but she had never learned to delegate responsibility to her subordinates. It had been well for Clara Barton if she had known better how to set others to work, but she knew how better than Dorothea Dix and was twenty years younger. Indeed, Clara Barton was younger at eighty than Dorothea Dix was at sixty, but she herself suffered somewhat from this same limitation. Dorothea Dix could not be everywhere, and with her system she needed to be everywhere, just as Clara Barton under her system had to be at the very front in direct management of her own line of activities. But Dorothea Dix, besides needing to be simultaneously on twenty battle-fields, had to be where she could examine and sift out and prepare for service the chosen from among a great many thousand women applying for the privilege of nursing wounded soldiers, and ranging all the way from sentimental school-girls to sickly and decrepit grandmothers. Again, Mr. Tiffany says:
Women nurses were volunteering by the thousands, the majority of them without the experience or health to fit them for such arduous service. Who should pass on their qualifications, who station, superintend, and train them? Now, under the Atlas weight of care and responsibilities so suddenly thrust on Miss Dix, the very qualifications which had so preëminently fitted her for the sphere in which she had wrought such miracles of success began to tell against her. She was nearly sixty years old, and with a constitution sapped by malaria, overwork, and pulmonary weakness. She had for years been a lonely and single-handed worker, planning her own projects, keeping her own counsel, and pressing on, unhampered by the need of consulting others, toward her self-chosen goal. The lone worker could not change her nature. She tried to do everything herself, and the feat before long became an impossibility. At length she came to recognize this, again and again exclaiming in her distress, “This is not the work I would have my life judged by.”
By that, however, in part her life-work must be judged, and, in the main, greatly to her advantage and wholly to her honor. We can see, however, the inevitable limitations of her work. Up to that time, she had dealt with small groups of subordinates from whom she could demand and secure some approach to perfection of organization and discipline. This she could not possibly secure in her present situation. Again we quote the discriminating words of her biographer:
But in war—especially in a war precipitately entered into by a raw and inexperienced people—all such perfection of organization and discipline is out of the question. If a good field hospital is not to be had, the best must be made of a bad one. If a skillful surgeon is not at hand, then an incompetent one must hack away after his own butcher fashion. If selfish and greedy attendants eat up and drink up the supplies of delicacies and wines for the sick, then enough more must be supplied to give the sick the fag end of a chance. It is useless to try to idealize war.... All this, however, Miss Dix could not bring herself to endure. Ready to live on a crust, and to sacrifice herself without stint, her whole soul was on fire at the spectacles of incompetence and callow indifference she was doomed daily to witness. She became overwrought, and lost the requisite self-control.... Inevitably she became involved in sharp altercations with prominent medical officials and with regimental surgeons.[9]
It is necessary to recall this in order to understand Clara Barton’s attitude toward the established military hospitals. She was not, in any narrow or technical term, a hospital nurse. She stood ready to assist the humblest soldier in any possible need, and to work in any hospital at any task howsoever humble, if that was where she could work to advantage. But she knew the hospitals in and about Washington too well not to appreciate these infelicities. She had no intention whatever of becoming a cog in that great and unmanageable machine.