Dorothea Dix

All experience shows that insanity seasonably treated is as certainly curable as a cold or a fever. Recovery is the rule; permanent disease the exception.

In Kentucky alone, of all the States I have traversed, it has not been my painful experience to find the insane poor, filling the cells of poor- houses, or the dungeons of the jails.

Of all the calamities to which ‘humanity is subject, none is so dreadful as insanity. Pinching want, hideous deformity, acute disease, mutilation, deafness, blindness; all these are distressing in their effects alike upon the sufferer and …

I approach you with confidence as the advocate of those who, alas, cannot plead their own cause — of those in whom the light of the understanding is darkened, and who are crushed under the weight of an overwhelming malady