We are analyzing the historical intake ledger from Dorothea Dix Hospital (Asylum) in Raleigh, North Carolina. The intake ledger starts in 1865 and contains about 7,500 records through 1917. The hospital is permanently closed, all the patients being analyzed have passed away, and these are de-identified data from public records. Currently we are cleaning and processing the OCR data from the physical ledgers and creating variables for historical and epidemiologic analysis. The full Legacy Report provides an extensive history. In addition to descriptive statistics and data visualizations, we will also examine opioid use during this period of history.
From the Final Report of the Dix Legacy Committee:
"Dix Park has a complex and driving history on this particular piece of land. This land in Raleigh has seen Native Americans, a plantation with enslaved African Americans owned by one of the founders of the City of Raleigh, a Union soldier encampment at the end of the Civil War, a psychiatric hospital for 156 years, cemeteries, and a struggle over the future of 21st Century mental health reform policy.
Positive aspects of its history include the establishment of an “insane asylum” in 1856 that represented at the time a tremendous shift in cultural attitudes toward people living with mental illness, a movement led nationally by Dorothea Dix. Dix Hospital was a psychiatric hospital, a retreat for the vulnerable, a home to staff and their families, a restoration center for patients, a training facility, and a center of health care innovation.
The negative aspects of its history include the displacement of Native Americans, enslavement of African Americans, segregation of minority communities, and separation and stigmatization of those with mental illness. For these reasons, the new park needs to honor or remember that legacy, educate the public about these uses of the site over time, and connect this legacy with the new uses of the park land. We believe that the best way to do that is to adopt a theme or vision that will guide the park’s new uses while remaining connected to its legacy."
The primary source material was an intake/discharge ledger, which has been digitized and de-identified for our analysis. We are cleaning and formatting the data, and will be making data visualizations to allow others to develop hypotheses for further research. In addition, interview transcripts, staff meeting notes, genealogy records, and newspaper archives are available to provide context and details, but are being analyzed separately.
Our quantitative analysis is primarily for developing hypotheses that can be examined using primary sources from the era. Preliminary data visualizations are being posted here.
We are grateful to the City of Raleigh for funding part of the digitization process and making these data available for research. Data were obtained and digitized by a team led by Robert C. Allen (the James Logan Godfrey Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Co-Director, Community Histories Workshop at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), and Sarah Almond (Program Coordinator, Dorothea Dix Park History Initiative and Assistant Director, Community Histories Workshop at the Center for Urban and Regional Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill). Katie Huber at the Gillings School of Global Public Health is working on a data viz for an independent study. The ledgers were transcribed and digitized by Thomas Burnett, Hannah Frisch, Keely Curry, and Dani Callahan. Data analysis is being conducted by Nabarun Dasgupta and Katie Huber. We are grateful to generations of taxpayers in North Carolina for supporting public universities. This study has been registered with the University of North Carolina Institutional Review Board.