Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802-1887) was a writer, teacher, and reformer who changed the way institutions treated individuals living with mental illness. Born in Hampden, Maine, she was the daughter of Joseph and Mary (Bigelow) Dix. At age 12, she ran away from home and eventually moved to Boston. In 1821, she started a school for girls where she taught until 1836. While in Boston, Dix became a close friend of the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing, and later met others in the Transcendentalist community, among them George Barrell Emerson, the cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In 1836, poor health and a demanding teaching schedule led her to travel to Liverpool, England where she convalesced at the home of the Unitarian philanthropist William Rathbone. It was during this time that she met Samuel Tuke, founder of the York Retreat for people with mental illness. She returned to Boston in 1837 and became involved in reform and charity work. In 1841, Dix taught Sunday school in a jail for women in East Cambridge where she saw conditions that drove her to investigate the treatment of people with mental illness throughout Massachusetts. In 1843, she submitted her first ‘Memorial’ to the state legislature in which she described her findings. By the end of 1845, Dix had inspected hundreds of penitentiaries, jails, and poorhouses in the Midwest and South as well as parts of eastern Canada.

From 1848 to 1854, Dix sought to make reforms at the federal level but was unsuccessful. She left for England in September 1854 and traveled to Scotland the following year. In 1856, Parliament approved a law that allocated funds for the improvement of asylums in Scotland. From 1855 to 1856, Dix traveled throughout Europe and made important changes in the countries she visited.

Dix returned to New York in the fall of 1856 and continued to work for mental health reform in the United States and Canada. In 1860, the House and Senate passed her bill that allocated funds for the New Jersey State Hospital in Trenton. In 1861 she was appointed superintendent of U.S. Army nurses and served in that capacity until 1865. After the war, Dix once again took up the cause of improving the treatment of people with mental illness and continued to investigate institutions throughout the country. When she was 79, she retired to the New Jersey State Hospital and lived there until she died in 1887. In her lifetime, Dix transformed ideas about mental illness and established more than 120 hospitals.

George Barrell Emerson (1789-1881) was born in Wells, Maine and graduated from Harvard in 1817. Shortly after graduating, he became headmaster of a private academy for boys in Lancaster, Massachusetts and later became the first headmaster of the English high school for boys in Boston. In 1823, he opened the Emerson School for girls, private school in Boston which he ran until his retirement from the teaching profession in 1855. In addition to his career in education, Emerson was very interested in the trees and shrubs native to Massachusetts and was instrumental in establishing the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. George Barrell Emerson died in Newton, Massachusetts on March 14, 1881.