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Wellness, the Legacy of Dorothea Dix

These are excerpts from the Executive Summary of the Dorothea Dix Legacy Report. The full Legacy Report is here.

Legacy: Something received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past

Wellness: “A state of complete physical, mental, and social wellbeing, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity
The World Health Organization

Adopt a Theme of Wellness:

[The Legacy Committee recommends adopting] a theme of wellness as the guiding theme for the park. What will make this park a unique destination site is a theme that honors or commemorates the past and connects it to a vision for the future. The theme of wellness will unite this place’s historical legacy, its cumulative meaning, and its destination value.
[We should] adopt a broad definition of legacy in honoring or remembering all that has occurred on this land –the Native Americans that lived here, the Hunter plantation, slavery, Dorothea Dix and her crusade to establish an asylum here, construction of the hospital with slave labor, the hospital during the Civil War, a psychiatric hospital for 156 years, the patients and staff, the buildings and cemeteries, closure of the hospital, and the hospital’s legacy in mental health reform and the connection of the past to the future.

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