Wake County, NC - Bicentennial

File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by
Barbara Kawamoto <bakawamoto@earthlink.net>

Reprinted with permission of the News & Observer and cannot be 
reproduced without permission. 

 An Earnest Appeal to the ‘Liberal and Humane Hearts’ of the State

The News and Observer
December 29, 1991
Raleigh 200/The New Capital
By Dorothea Lynde Dix

"Memorial Soliciting a State Hospital for the Protection and Cure 
of the Insane" 1848

   Could the sighs, and moans, and shrieks of the insane throughout 
your wide-extending land reach you here and now, how would your 
sensibilities to the miseries of these unfortunates be quickened; 
how eager would you be to devise schemes for their relief - plans 
for their restoration to the blessing of a right exercise of the 
reasoning faculties.

   Could their melancholy histories be spread before you as 
revealed to my grieved spirit during the last three months, how 
promptly, how earnestly would you search out the most approved means 
of relief; how trifling, how insignificant, by comparison, would 
appear the sacrifices you are asked to make; how would a few dimes 
and dollars, gathered from each citizen, diminish in value as a
possession, compared with the certain benefits and vast good to be 
secured for the suffering insane, and for their afflicted kindred,
by the consecration and application of a sufficient fund to the 
construction of a suitable hospital in which the restoring cares of
skillfully applied physical and moral treatment should be received, 
and in which humane and healing influences should take the place of 
abuse and neglect; and of galling chains and loathsome dungeons.

   North Carolina, hailed of her sons, "the glorious Old North," 
North Carolina, unburdened by State debts, untouched by serious
misfortunes, is last and latest of the "old thirteen," save the 
small territory of Delaware, to make provision for the care and 
cure of her insane citizens, and almost the last embracing all the 
New States in our broad Union.

   But it is not to the State pride of the intelligent citizens 
of North Carolina that my appeal comes; it is to the liberal and 
humane hearts of this portion of my fellow citizens, its plea reaches; 
it cannot be rejected, it dares not consent to be put off, it claims 
with earnest importunity that its merits may be discussed, it would 
merge in oblivion the multiplied miseries resulting from past neglects
and procrastination, by wakening to action the efficient energies of 
humanity and justice.

   At present there are practiced in the State of North Carolina, 
four methods of disposing of her more than one thousand insane,
epileptic, and idiot citizens, viz:  In the cells and dungeons of 
the County jails, in comfortless rooms and cages in the county poor
houses, in the dwellings of private families, and by sending the 
patients to distant hospitals, more seasonably established in sister
States.  I ask to represent some of the very serious evils and 
disadvantages of each and all these methods of disposing of the
insane, whether belonging to the poor or to the opulent classes of 
citizens.

   If the plea of suffering humanity is insufficient to quicken 
Legislative interposition, an argument based on indisputable evidence,
may be advanced, whose force cannot be slighted; I mean the economy, 
directly to individuals, towns and counties, and remotely, but not 
less actually to the State, of establishing without delay, a Hospital 
for the treatment and protection of the insane.

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