a biography of the day-susan dimock, m.d. (physician, opened nursing school)
Susan Dimock
Susan Dimock M.D. (April 24, 1847 – May 7, 1875) was a pioneer in American Medicine who received her qualification as a doctor from the University of Zurich in 1871 and was subsequently appointed resident physician of the New England Hospital for Women and Children in 1872. The hospital, now known as the Dimock Community Health Center, was renamed in her honor after her tragic drowning in 1875. Dimock was traveling to Europe for pleasure and profession when she died in the shipwreck of the SS Schiller off the coast of the Scilly Isles. She is also remembered for becoming the first woman member of the North Carolina Medical Society.
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When her application to enroll at Harvard Medical School was rejected, Dimock turned to the medical schools of Europe and was admitted to the University of Zurich in Switzerland in 1868. She graduated with high honors in 1871 and her thesis was published that year in Zurich. After further clinical studies in Vienna and Paris, she returned to the United States. As the all-male North Carolina Medical Society would only grant her honorary membership, Dimock rejoined the New England Hospital for Women and Children, where she was appointed resident physician on August 20, 1872. She greatly improved and increased the service of the hospital, in the course of which she opened the first graded school of nursing in the United States on September 1, 1872. She worked as a surgeon, developed a private practice in obstetrics and gynecology and performed a number of important surgical operations, a number of which were mentioned in the medical journals of the day.[1]
Legacy
Dimock had long wanted to visit Europe once more; when the opportunity to do so came about in May 1875, Dimock and two of her closest friends—Caroline Crane and Elizabeth "Bessie" Greene (daughter of reformer William Batchelder Greene)--boarded the iron steamship SS Schiller, bound from New York to Plymouth and Hamburg. On 7 May 1875, Dimock, Greene, and Crane were among the 336 people who lost their lives when the SS Schiller hit the Retarrier Ledges off the Isles of Scilly near the Bishop Rock lighthouse in heavy fog.[1] Dimock was 28 years old.
Her gravestone at Forest Hills Cemetery, Boston reads: "Susan Dimock. Surgeon and physician to the New England Hospital for Women and Children. Lost in the steamer Schiller on the Scilly rocks. May 8 [sic],
1875." "At the time of her death her loss was considered irreparable as there were few, if any, among her sex endowed with the skill and qualified by the requisite training to take her place." - The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, XIX:30 (1926)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Dimock
