Dorothea Puente was an American serial killer who was assumed to have killed up to nine people. Puente was born on 1929 in Redlands California. She was no stranger to criminal justice system when she began killing. Her life of crime began when she was caught trying to forge checks and was sentenced to one year in jail. In 1960 she was arrested for operating a brothel and sentenced to ninety days in jail. Shortly after her release she was arrested and charged with vagrancy and sentenced to 90 more days in jail. After her release Puente would spend time in local bars searching for elderly men who receive social security benefits. She would then forge their signature in order to steal their benefits. She was eventually caught and charged with…
"Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still." -Dorothea Lange…
Dorothea Dix grew up in Massachusetts, but was born in Hampden Maine.Her early years were hard and very lonely because her father was an Methodist preacher. She had to take care of the house and her family because her mother was mentally ill and her father was usually away.Dorothea was the oldest of three children. When Dorothea was 12 years old she moved to Boston to live with her grandmother. In Boston and Worcester she established a lot of schools.Dorothea loved to read books and learn. She was a teacher, author and reformer. She left her 24 year career of teaching and started nursing at age 39. In march of 1841 Dix went to court about how mentally ill were treated like prisoners. They were chained in small dark spaces, filthy and abused.…
Education, religion, and the condition of the poor were all aspects of society that women felt morally obliged to improve. Dorothea’s action in asylum reform portrays how women of the time maneuvered through the legal world of men in order to gain social reform. Although, Dorothea returned to America in 1837, it was not until 1841 when invited by Reverend John T. G. Nichols to teach a Sunday school in the East Cambridge jail in New England, did Dorothea begin her…
Dorothea Lange was a photographer from the United States who became well known for her photographic journalism on farmers during the Great Depression. Before I go into detail about her work as a photographer, I will offer background to her past. Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn was born on May 26, 1895 in Hoboken, New Jersey. She was born to Heinrich Nutzhorn and Johanna Lange, second generation German immigrants who resided at 1041 Bloomfield street. Her only sibling was a younger brother named Martin. When her father left their family when she was only 12 years old, she dropped her middle name and inherited her mother’s maiden name. At seven years of age, Dorothea…
Reforms in prisons and insane asylums began to take flight in America as Dorothea Dix, an American reformer, began advocating for safe places for the mentally unstable to reside. Her pursuit of such an institution began in 1941. Dix helped to form five phychiatric hospitals in America. Phychiatric hospitals were given a bad reputation when some hospitals were not treating the patients, rather their main concern was giving the mentally unstable a place to stay where they would not be a disturbance to the rest of society. Also during this time, prisons were holding anyone who had commited massive crimes to those who were unworthy of arrest. Men, women, and children were all detained the same prisons despite the severity of their crimes. Because…
The age of reform, during the 1800s, was a time of transformation for the greater good. Quite a few people had done immense things during this time, but the people I admire the most are Horace Mann and Dorothea Dix, two extravagant reformers of the age of reform.…
Dorothea Lynde Dix was quoted as saying, "In a world where there is so much to be done, I felt strongly impressed that there must be something for me to do." Dix began at the age of 39, and spent the next 20 years as a social reformer for the treatment of the mentally ill. When asked to teach a Sunday School class at a women's correctional facility, Dix was appalled at the conditions, as well as the fact that many of the women weren't criminals, but were instead mentally ill. This is where her crusade began. Her work had immediate results throughout the country, and the changes are still being felt even today.…
entered the nursing field as a matron at New England Hospital in 1874. She left in 1876 and spent two years in England before enrolling at Boston City Hospital Training School for Nurses. In 1880 she was hired to start a training school at Montreal General Hospital. In 1881, she was offered the superintendence of the Training School for Nurses at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In 1889, she moved to New York as the director of nursing at St. Luke's Hospital, and from there became superintendent of nursing at the Presbyterian Hospital of New York from 1892-1921. Maxwell was also the first director of the Presbyterian Hospital's nursing school, founded in 1892, which later became the Columbia University School of Nursing. She did commendable job in nursing throughout her life to bring many laurels in healing…
Every day is the same to you; you wake up, read the paper, and drink your coffee. You work at the East Cambridge Prison, where you keep the inmates in order by whipping them, chaining them up, and by not giving them food. You know that the conditions are wrong and inhumane, but it’s a well-paying job. You don’t speak out because you’re worried about your family and three kids at home who need to be fed. Stories like these occurred in prisons and mental institutions all around the world. The article, “Dorothea Lynde Dix,” describes the awful conditions Dorothea Dix witnessed in prisons and mental institutions: “... flogged, starved, chained, physically and sexually abused by their keepers, and left…
Dorthea Dix’s early life, humanitarian acts, and later life have contributed to the way mankind views the mentally ill today. To begin with, she was born on April 4, 1802 in Hampden, Maine. Dorothea was the first of three children; daughter of Joseph Dix and Mary Bigelow Dix (Bumb,…
To say that Dorothea Lange led a full life is an understatement. She led and extraordinary life and it is a fascinating tale. As you will see, she was an amazing person, charming and likeable, but also a person with just as many hardships as the subjects of her work.…
Dorothea Dix made life for the mentally ill grand compared to how it was before she took interest in their health and well being. Dorothea Dix was the first American to take interest in how the mentally ill were treated and spoke out about it. Dorothea Dix was a woman making a change in a time where woman were still not equal to men. She was one of the few women who spoke out against something during her time period. Dorothea Dix was the start of the interest in the human brain and its defects. If it wasn’t for Dorothea Dix speaking out for mentally challenged rights and fair treatment there would have been no interest taken into them anytime soon. Thanks to Dorothea Dix we now are politically correct when talking about the mentally ill and there are medicines and special treatment for them, even special, safe and tender housing places especially for them.…
There was a big deal with depression in the 1800’s because one who was taught to have a mental illness didn’t get the treatment they needed. Society didn’t believe mental illness was a problem so therefore family members secluded loved ones who might show signs of any mental illness from the outside world. They also had mental hospitals in which patients displaying mental illness where put in. Benjamin Rush and Dorothea Dix discovered that these institutions were mistreating many of the patients and acted more like jails. There were many writers with very controversial novels such as William Faulkner and Charlotte Gilman. These two were well known…
During the 1900s people viewed mental illness as a disease of individual weakness or a spiritual disease, in which the mentally ill were sent to asylums. This was a temporary solution in hope to remove “lunatics” from the community. This caused a severe overcrowding, which led to a decline in patient care and reviving the old procedures and medical treatments. Early treatments to cure mental illness were really forms of torture. Asylums used wrist and ankle restraints, ice water baths, shock machines, straightjackets, electro-convulsive therapy, even branding patients, and the notorious lobotomy and “bleeding practice”. These early treatments seen some improvement in patients, although today this eras method of handling the mentally ill is considered barbaric, the majority of people were content because the “lunatics” were no longer visible in society.…