LETTER: Autograph letter signed to William Henry Prince showing lithographic image of the Virginia Institution for the deaf and dumb and the blind.
DIX, D[OROTHEA] ALS, 2 pp., plus, dated Oct. 22, 1858, from Boston, 8vo. on letter paper with cognate leaf snowing lithographic image of the Virginia Institution for the deaf and dumb and the blind; signed vertically "D.L. Dix.", Fine.
The letter does not identify the recipient, but from internal evidence and research the author is clearly William Henry Prince, the superintendent of the Hospital for the Insane at Northampton, Massachusetts, which Dix visited in 1858.
During 1858 and 1859 she took a series of extensive cross-country trips to investigate asylums and hospitals. This letter was written while she had stopped in Boston.
Everywhere Dix travelled, people sought her advice with hospitals and asylums. This letter represents her response as hospital inspector and America's most knowledgeable advocate for the mentally ill.
The Northampton Lunatic Hospital was the third state hospital for the insane built in Massachusetts. Preparations for the hospital began in 1855, and Dr. William Henry Prince was appointed the first superintendent on August 25, 1857. Prince oversaw the building completion, and his first patient was admitted on July 1, 1858. The By-Laws of the hospital required weekly religious services, which gradually expanded into a full oral and lecture series. Prince remained as superintendent until 1864.
Dix thanks Prince for his "very kind reception, and asks that he excuse her candor in alluding to the exposure of patients in the Chapel to the observations of strangers and visitors…eager as most persons are to peer into the interior of all such Institutions-- they feel differently when themselves are objects of curious...notice."
The lithograph of the Virginia institution is itself an interesting facet of the letter. Dix visited institutions in the South during a period when sectional conflict was worsening. She believed she had a mission to help the insane in all regions and abhorred the [illegible].
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