Susan Dimock



Dr Susan Dimock M.D., (born 1847 died 1875) was a pioneer in American Medicine, qualifying as a doctor at the University of Zurich in 1871 and being appointed resident physician of the New England Hospital for Women and Children in 1862. She was the first woman member of the North Carolina Medical Society. After she was drowned off the Scilly Isles crossing the Atlantic in the steamship SS Schiller in 1875, the hospital was renamed the Dimock Community Health Center.

She was born in the spring of 1847 in Washington, North Carolina to Mary Malvina Owens, teacher and hotel manager, and Henry Dimock, a lawyer and editor of the "North State Whig". She was taught by her mother and later attended a girl's school taught by a "Mr. Boghart". After her father's death in 1863, her mother moved to Boston and Susan studied at the New England Hospital for Women and Children and applied to Harvard Medical School at the same time as Sophia Jex-Blake. When their applications were rejected, she turned to Europe and entered the University of Zurich in 1868. She graduated three years later and spent several months training in European hospitals.

Because the all-male North Carolina Medical Society would only granted her honorary membership she rejoined the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston as a resident physician. She worked as a surgeon, developed a private practice and also developed the first graded school of nursing in the United States. Her speciality was obstetrics and gynecology.

At 28 years old she was drowned with 335 others in a shipwreck on a voyage to Europe. She was with two friends, Caroline Crane and Elizabeth "Bessie" Greene (daughter of reformer William Batchelder Greene), on the iron rigged steamship SS Schiller from New York to Plymouth and Hamburg when it hit the Retarrier Ridge off the Isles of Scilly near the Bishop Rock lighthouse, in heavy fog.

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, 1875

In 1939 North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development erected a historic marker in her honour.

In 1996, the original marble grave stone was moved from Boston to St. Peter's Episcopal Church cemetery in Washington because a group in Boston decided to replace it with a granite replica.