(b. April 4, 1802; d. July 17, 1887) Superintendent of Women Nurses during the Civil War.

Dorothea Dix was a leading social reformer who advocated humane treatment of prisoners and the mentally ill before the Civil War and became the Union's Superintendent of Women Nurses during that war.

She was born in Hampton, Maine, and raised in Massachusetts. Due to her family's poverty, her father's frequent absences, and her mother's semi-invalidism, Dix also spent time with her grandparents in Boston and with an aunt in Worcester. She eagerly sought an education and studied hard. Responding to her intense desire to teach, she opened a school for young children when she was only fourteen years old. In 1819, she went to live with her widowed grandmother and opened a school in Boston. She found in Unitarianism an outlet for her strong sense of faith. During the 1820s, Dix wrote an elementary school...