Familiarity with suffering, it is said, blunts the sensibilities, and where neglect once finds a footing other injuries are multiplied. - Dorothea Dix

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

Prisons are not constructed in view of being converted into county hospitals, and almshouses are not founded as receptacles for the insane. And yet, in the face of justice and common sense, wardens are by law compelled to receive, and the masters of almshouses not to refuse, insane and idiotic subjects in all stages of mental disease and privation.

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 those with whom he is connected