Join the Friends of the Jamaica Plain Branch Library on March 12 at 6:30PM for a discussion with author Susan Wilson on her biography of Susan Dimock, M.D for whom the Dimock Center and Roxbury’s Dimock Street is named. Susan will discuss her book: Women and Children First: The Trailblazing Life of Susan Dimock, M.D.
In 19th-century America, it was assumed that woman patients would be treated by male doctors. The idea of a “woman doctor” was deemed by many to lie somewhere between unfathomable and repugnant. Then along came Susan Dimock. A young North Carolinian who dreamed of becoming a physician, and grew up to practice medicine in Boston, Dimock was not the first American woman to battle the patriarchal medical establishment. But in the 1870s, she was arguably the best-educated, most-skilled woman surgeon in the nation as well as living proof that a woman could be competent, smart, lovely, and kind—all in the same package.
Dimock’s life reads like an adventure story, from recoiling at slave auctions and witnessing Civil War battles to escaping her fire-engulfed Southern hometown, then finding her place among Boston’s most enterprising women. She studied medicine in Zurich and Vienna, hiked the Swiss Alps, executed complex surgeries, and trained America’s first professional nurses, ultimately inspiring a new generation of female surgeons. It is no surprise that a prestigious Viennese medical professor, when asked for advice to aspiring young doctors, replied simply, “Make yourself to be like Miss Dimock.” This biography is the first to give Susan Dimock her rightful place in medical, women’s, and world history.
Susan Wilson is the official House Historian of the Omni Parker House in Boston, an Alumna Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, and an Honorary Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Her books on Boston history include Women and Children First: The Trailblazing Life of Susan Dimock, M.D.; Heaven, By Hotel Standards: The History of the Omni Parker House; Boston Sites and Insights; The Literary Trail of Greater Boston; and Garden of Memories: A Guide to Historic Forest Hills.
