도로시아 린드 딕스(DoroThea Lynde Dix)의 정신병원 개혁운동 (Dorothea Lynde Dix's Insane Asylum Reform Movement)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국미국사학회
· 수록지 정보 : 미국사연구 / 18권 / 53 ~ 81페이지
· 저자명 : 이현주

초록

Dorothea Lynde Dix was a famous reformer who devoted herself to the mental asylum reform movement in the mid-nineteenth century. For generations, historians have noted her among the assortment of antebellum reformers. Despite her remarkable reputation, Dix floated outside the mainstream of American history, and her “lunacy reform” has only been regarded as philanthropic work. However, as a nineteenth-century reformer she was involved in various social reform movements for prisons, the poor, the insane and even tobacco, that were intended to settle the social order.
Dix’s idea of social reform was rooted in the concepts of moral education and perfectionism in the age of Romanticism, and the zealous attitude of Unitarianism toward social reforms. She thought that deviant behavior like crime and insanity could be rectified under an appropriate environment with good regulations combining kindness and well-ordered discipline, and that Christians should devote themselves to solving social problems to restore social order and advance the progress of American society.
Dix’s reform was a potent consequence of humanitarianism based on a new cultural sensibility of distaste for pain. She moved from state to state to research the conditions of jails, poorhouses and alms houses, and wrote a number of memorials based on the results that reported indecent states of treatment for the mentally ill and disclosed the cruel manner in which the insane had been treated. Dix urged that offering specialized places of solace for the impoverished insane would be favorable to removing social corruption and injustice, as well as responsive to the social imperative of humanitarianism.
At the same time, Dix’s work was affected by ‘moral treatment’, a medical change in the nineteenth century associated with the burgeoning medical profession. Dix’s early proposals for the poor incurable insane were attacked, especially in New York, by mental hospital superintendents because it was contrary to mental hospital doctors’ interests by admitting their lack of ability to cure mental illness. But after the failure in New York, she adopted the superintendents’ explanation of mental illness, and they began to cooperate in lunacy reform.
However, state hospitals built by the reform movement shortly faced serious financial difficulties. Both the lack of adequate funds and the drastic growth of poor clientele contributed to the rapid degeneration of public hospitals. Improper training of personnel and poor management accelerated the decline of state institutions. After only two decades the custodial purpose at mental institutions took precedence over therapeutics, and ‘moral treatment’ disappeared.
To summarize, Dix’s lunacy reform movement was not only philanthropic work in which traditional concepts of charity and benevolence of Victorian womanhood were expanded to the sphere of a recently transformed modern society. Despite the subsequent deterioration of mental asylums, it was a positive social activity that created institutions to cope with social deviance problems brought on or deepened by the growing diversity and size of population, physical mobility, and urbanization.

영어초록

Dorothea Lynde Dix was a famous reformer who devoted herself to the mental asylum reform movement in the mid-nineteenth century. For generations, historians have noted her among the assortment of antebellum reformers. Despite her remarkable reputation, Dix floated outside the mainstream of American history, and her “lunacy reform” has only been regarded as philanthropic work. However, as a nineteenth-century reformer she was involved in various social reform movements for prisons, the poor, the insane and even tobacco, that were intended to settle the social order.
Dix’s idea of social reform was rooted in the concepts of moral education and perfectionism in the age of Romanticism, and the zealous attitude of Unitarianism toward social reforms. She thought that deviant behavior like crime and insanity could be rectified under an appropriate environment with good regulations combining kindness and well-ordered discipline, and that Christians should devote themselves to solving social problems to restore social order and advance the progress of American society.
Dix’s reform was a potent consequence of humanitarianism based on a new cultural sensibility of distaste for pain. She moved from state to state to research the conditions of jails, poorhouses and alms houses, and wrote a number of memorials based on the results that reported indecent states of treatment for the mentally ill and disclosed the cruel manner in which the insane had been treated. Dix urged that offering specialized places of solace for the impoverished insane would be favorable to removing social corruption and injustice, as well as responsive to the social imperative of humanitarianism.
At the same time, Dix’s work was affected by ‘moral treatment’, a medical change in the nineteenth century associated with the burgeoning medical profession. Dix’s early proposals for the poor incurable insane were attacked, especially in New York, by mental hospital superintendents because it was contrary to mental hospital doctors’ interests by admitting their lack of ability to cure mental illness. But after the failure in New York, she adopted the superintendents’ explanation of mental illness, and they began to cooperate in lunacy reform.
However, state hospitals built by the reform movement shortly faced serious financial difficulties. Both the lack of adequate funds and the drastic growth of poor clientele contributed to the rapid degeneration of public hospitals. Improper training of personnel and poor management accelerated the decline of state institutions. After only two decades the custodial purpose at mental institutions took precedence over therapeutics, and ‘moral treatment’ disappeared.
To summarize, Dix’s lunacy reform movement was not only philanthropic work in which traditional concepts of charity and benevolence of Victorian womanhood were expanded to the sphere of a recently transformed modern society. Despite the subsequent deterioration of mental asylums, it was a positive social activity that created institutions to cope with social deviance problems brought on or deepened by the growing diversity and size of population, physical mobility, and urbanization.

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