Dorothea Dix lobbied for change: the State was to change the way it cared for the insane. After traveling the country documenting the conditions of prisons, asylums and alms-houses, she sent a report to each state detailing the maltreatment she observed.

"Insanity sensibly treated is as certainly curable as a cold or fever. Recovery is the rule; permanent disease is the exception."

Her national bill, which took six years to pass both houses of Congress in 1854, asked for twenty-thousand square miles of land to be sold for the care of the insane, but deemed unconstitutional in the hands of President Franklin Pierce, who vetoed it.

In 1848, Dorothea's bill for the establishment of the New Jersey Lunatic Asylum passed unanimously and her "first-born child", the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum, opened as the first public mental hospital in New Jersey designed under the Kirkbride plan by Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride, Superintendent of the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital and dear friend and long-time supporter of Miss Dix.

Within the same year, the establishment of the Pennsylvania State Lunatic Hospital for the Insane was also successful: her "second-born child".

Dorothea made many visits to the Harrisburg Asylum, eventually residing in the Trenton Asylum as a patient until her death, but the "children" continued to be born.

Aged, broken and full of suffering, it appears she did not want to die, for she knew the fight was not over, "I think even lying on my bed, I can still do something," (Francis 372) spoken two months before her death in response to a friend wishing her many more years to come. On July 17, 1887 Dorothea passed away in her tower apartment at the Trenton Asylum, in the declining hours of sunlight.

There below her stretched the park-like expanse of the grounds of the asylum, and there, sitting under the trees or wandering along the paths in the fullest enjoyment of liberty possible to their sad condition, were the poor children of affliction, whose former miseries in chains and cages had first started in her the vow of consecration never to the end to be broken (Francis 373).

_{Tiffany, Francis. Life of Dorothea Lynde Dix, Cambridge: The River Side Press, 1891.}