Many of the women I’ve written about have endured arduous travel to advance their life work, including Dorothea Lynde Dix, the passionate crusader for the humane treatment of people with mental illness & the subject of my first biography, “Breaking the Chains: The Crusade of Dorothea Lynde Dix.” (I grew up on the grounds of a mental hospital, where my father was a psychiatrist.)
“It is time that people should have learnt,” Dix proclaimed, “that to be insane is not to be disgraced; that sickness in not to be ranked with crime.” (Note: I won’t be posting for two weeks: I’ll be off traveling, although not arduously.)