- July 6, 2021
Women and Children First:
The Remarkable Life of Dr. Susan Dimmock TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2021 , 11 AM
A PowerPoint lecture by Susan Wilson, from her biography-in-progress
To her contemporaries in Boston of the 1870s, Susan Dimmock was well known as a strong, selfless innovator in American medicine — one of the first group of female physicians to provide the unique professional health care needed by women, and one of the most respected and beloved surgeons in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Born and raised in the slave-holding South, she escaped from the ravages of Civil War, fled North during wartime, intersected with the Underground Railroad, connected with Dr. Marie Zakrzewska at the innovative New England Hospital for Women and Children, studied medicine at the University of Zurich, and returned to Boston to become a leader in American health care, where she molded America’s first real training school for nurses. Dr. Dimmock is the namesake of Roxbury’s Dimmock Street and the innovative Dimmock Center that still straddles that road.