Susan Dimock • Pioneering Female Surgeon
Introduction
Back in 1995, when I was writing history columns for the Boston Globe, I discovered the story of Susan Dimock, the pioneering 19th century surgeon and namesake of the Dimock Center in Roxbury. In the wake of my published article, I helped establish the Dimock Heritage Fund, which fundraised for the recreation of Dimock’s badly decaying headstone at Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain. I was obsessed with this project for more than a year, giving lectures and guided tours, then moving on to other ventures, including researching and writing a history and guidebook for the cemetery.
Twenty years later, my friend Mary Smoyer asked me to deliver a lecture on Dr. Dimock for the JP Historical Society, on behalf of the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail, with whom I had worked for many years. I declined, saying that I hadn’t even thought about Susan Dimock for two decades, and it was so long ago that my ancient lectures existed only as color slides. Mary countered with an irresistible argument: “You’re having knee replacement surgery in February. You are going to be stuck in bed for a long time. What better things do you have to do than work on a new Susan Dimock lecture?” I caved and created a PowerPoint, which I delivered to the JP Historical Society in 2015. There was a snowstorm that night. I was on crutches and heavy-duty pain drugs. And there was a standing-room-only crowd, who not only loved the lecture, but wanted to “buy the book.” I told them there was no book. Not by anyone else. And certainly not by me.
Fast forward to later that year, when I applied to the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis to become a Visiting Scholar. My proposed project: to research and write Susan Dimock’s first full length biography. It’s now four years later. I have traveled around the world to research and write this book, which is now 80% done. And in the midst of this, my friend, Dr. Jane Petro of Jamaica Plain, convinced me to enter a segment of Dr. Dimock’s story into a poster contest sponsored by the American College of Surgeons. We did it, and I knew I was over my head in the world of medicine. And though there were more than 180 entries, we actually won. Herewith our poster. —Susan Wilson, September 2020
The Surgeon
Susan Dimock was among the first female physicians in the United States recognized as a surgeon. Apprenticed at the age of eighteen to Dr. Marie Zakrzewska at the New England Hospital for Women and Children, Susan was recognized as exceptionally talented. Wanting her to receive the best medical education possible, Dr. Zak and her colleagues encouraged her to apply to Harvard Medical School; she was denied on the basis of sex in 1867. Learning that the medical school at the prestigious University of Zurich was admitting a small number of women as an experiment, Susan applied, was accepted, and graduated with honors in three years. Following an internship in Vienna, where she was inspired by surgeon Theodor Billroth, Susan returned to Boston to become Resident Physician at the NEHWC. During her three years there, she professionalized the first formal nurses training program in the nation, established a busy private clinical practice, and supervised both the care of patients and the education of students at the hospital.
The Surgery
In September of 1873, a seven-year-old girl from Nantucket was admitted to the NEHWC. Two years earlier, she had been struck by a hand cart on the side of her neck, an inch below and behind her ear lobe. Her neck had subsequently swollen, resulting in a large tumor. Using ether as anesthetic, Dr. Dimock performed an operation to remove the tumor. A T-shaped incision was made over the tumor, and the sternocleidomastoid muscle cut to expose the tumor itself, which was composed of lobules varying in size from “a pea to a goose egg.” Each lobule was enclosed in separate capsules, which were evacuated one by one. A total of seventy-one tumors were removed with little bleeding. The significance of the operation was attested to by the fact that a photographer was hired to do both pre- and post-operative images. Two years after the successful operation, both the patient and Dr. Dimock died—the patient from “dropsy” and the surgeon in a shipwreck en route to Europe, where she planned to connect with colleagues and purchase medical equipment. Susan Dimock had just turned twenty-eight.
The Learned Observation
Mary Putnam-Jacobi, MD, herself a pioneering woman doctor, visited Dr. Susan Dimock in Boston in 1874. She wrote that Dimock had “already won herself a deserved reputation among some of the best surgeons in the city” and “already performed many important surgical operations.” Then she proceeded to comment on this difficult neck tumor surgery. “Last fall, while on a visit to Boston, Dr. Dimock showed me photographs of another hospital patient, from whose neck she had removed a large sarcomatous tumor. The operation had been performed in the presence of the students of the hospital and of Dr. [Samuel] Cabot, consulting surgeon. After reading the record of the case, I mentioned a precisely similar operation that I had seen performed by Richet in the Clinique at Paris, and the lecture, in which he described the great difficulty of removing a tumor so deeply embedded in so dangerous a locality. The Professor had seemed not a little proud of his own success in coping with these difficulties, and had taken care that a numerous auditorium should witness his triumph. “At this Dr. Dimock laughed, and said, ‘I was asked why I had issued no invitations, but I had forgotten all about them.’ She added, ‘Indeed I have too little personal ambition to care who sees, when I am once assured my work is well done.’ The remark was characteristic of the modesty and simplicity that distinguish the young surgeon.”
The Significance in the History of Surgery
In the three years that Dr. Dimock practiced in Boston, she came to be highly regarded. Her early death let to an outpouring of sympathy from both the female and male medical communities, not only in Boston and her hometown of Washington, North Carolina, but throughout the U.S. and Europe as well. Her funeral and subsequent burial at Forest Hills Cemetery were covered by the press and resulted in accolades and condolences from around the world. In 1884, the street alongside the hospital was named for Dimock, the same year the first woman was admitted to the Massachusetts Medical Society—an honor for which Dimock’s work paved the way. In 1969, the New England Hospital for Women and Children became the Dimock Community Health Center. The photographs and the complete medical record of Dimock’s neck tumor surgery, held at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University, provide a unique window into the skills and accomplishments of this remarkable woman surgeon.
The New England Hospital’s Surgical Legacy
The first five women surgeons admitted to the American College of Surgery in 1913 were all affiliated with the New England Hospital for Women and Children.
Adapted from the winning poster in the American College of Surgeons historic poster contest 2020 and kindly used with permission of the authors:
Jane Arbuckle Petro, MD, FACS, New York Medical College
Susan Wilson, Resident Scholar Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University, Waltham MA
Megan Catalano, senior, Brandeis University, Waltham MA
This study originated in research being done by Susan Wilson for her work-in-progress, a full-length biography of Dr. Dimock. The working title is Women and Children First: The Remarkable Life of Dr. Susan Dimock.