nois and as far south as
Louisiana. "I shall be obliged," she said, "to speak with great
plainness and to reveal many things revolting to the taste, and from
which my woman's nature shrinks with peculiar sensitiveness.... I
proceed, gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present
state of insane persons within this Commonwealth, in cages, closets,
cellars, stalls, pens, chained, naked, beaten with rods and lashed
into obedience.... I give a few illustrations but description fades
before reality." If we could dismiss the subject by saying she reports
instance after instance where men and women were confined in the
almshouses in Massachusetts in such conditions of inhumanity and
neglect as no intelligent farmer would tolerate for his swine, we
could avoid some unpleasant details; but the statement would be
ineffective because it would seem incredible. At the almshouse in
Danvers, confined in a remote, low, outbuilding, she found a young
woman, once respectable, industrious and worthy, whose mind had been
deranged by disappointments and trials. "There she stood," says Miss
Dix, "clinging to or beating upon the bars of her caged apartment, the
contracted size of which afforded space only for increasing
accumulations of filth,--a foul spectacle; there she stood, with naked
arms, dishevelled hair, the unwashed frame invested with fragments of
unclean garments, the air so extremely offensive, though ventilation
was afforded on all sides but one, that it was not possible to remain
beyond a few moments without retreating for recovery to the outward
air. Irritation of body, produced by utter filth and exposure, incited
her to the horrid process of tearing off her skin by inches; her neck
and person were thus disfigured to hideousness.... And who protects
her," Miss Dix suggestively asks, "who protects her,--that worse than
Pariah outcast,--from other wrongs and blacker outrages!" This
question had more meaning for Miss Dix than we might suppose, for at
the almshouse in Worcester she had found an insane Madonna and her
babe: father unknown.

Fair and beautiful Newton finds a place in this chapter of dishonor,
with a woman chained, nearly nude, and filthy beyond measure: "Sick,
horror-struck, and almost incapable of retreating, I gained the
outward air." A case in Groton attained infamous celebrity, not
because the shame was without parallel but because the overseers of
the poor tried to discredit the statements of Miss D