It wasn't a good idea to be insane in New Jersey 150 years ago. The state had no mental hospitals. People who went mad were just locked up in poor houses and jails, or farmed out to who ever would care for them cheapest.

But in 1844 the Yankee reformer Dorothea Dix came to New Jersey to agitate for the construction of a modern state asylum. To prove her point, she traveled around the state to document the horrible conditions facing the mentally ill.

She found people living in filth, chained up, and beaten. At the Morris County Poor House she found that the violently insane were kept in the cellar, where, said Dix, one would not want to keep a dog.

In Essex County, men, women, children, sane, and insane were thrown together in the jail.

In Shrewsbury, an inmate had wandered off into the woods and no body much cared about it.

At the Salem County Poor House, the keeper told the story how one madman jumped at him:
I knew I must master him now or never: I ...caught......

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Title: Dorothea Dix
Approximate Word Count: 320
Approximate Pages: 2 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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