On this day, Dorthea Dix was born in Hampden, Maine -- which was then part of Massachusetts. She moved to Boston to live with extended family, and at age 14 opened her first school for young children. For the next 20 years she combined teaching with writing textbooks, poetry and religious tracts for young readers.

While teaching a class in the Cambridge Jail in 1841, she realized that many of the inmates we're mentally ill, and simply not criminals. The reformer Horace Mann had long campaigned for state mental hospitals, and as an influential senator he Dix championed the creation of state mental hospitals.

Dix was directly involved in founding 32 mental hospitals, and promoting greater awareness of mental illness as a treatable condition. >Read more.