Dorothea Dix

When a Boston woman named Dorothea Dix agreed to teach Sunday school at a jail in 1841, she was horrified to see that many inmates were bound in chains and locked in cages.
Most people who were judged insane were locked away in dirty, crowded prison cells. If they misbehaved, they were whipped.For two years she quietly gathered firsthand information about the horrors she had seen, preparing a detailed report for the Massachusetts state legislature. In turn, they passed a law aimed at improving conditions. She got nine Southern states to set up public hospitals for the mentally ill.