001[Music] Good afternoon and welcome to the state library. My name is Alyssa Pearson and I'm the special collections processing librarian here. We are so happy you've joined us for today's author talk and would like to take this opportunity to thank the house broadcast services for their help with this event. Today we are excited to welcome photographer, writer, multimedia artist, and public historian Susan Wilson. She is currently the official house historian of the Omni Parker House and a scholar at the Brandeise University women's studies research center. Susan holds a BA, MA, and ABD all but dissertation in history from Tufts University. In addition to teaching history on both the secondary and college level, she worked as a journalist and photojournalist with her work appearing regularly in the Boston Globe between 1978 and 1996. Susan has long
002been associated with and consulted for Boston's historic walking tours, including the Boston Women's Heritage Trail, Boston Harbor Walk, the Freedom Trail, Black Heritage Trail, National Park Service, and Boston by Foot. Susan is here today during Women's History Month to talk about her book titled Women and Children First: The Trailblazing Life of Susan Demick, MD. Susan Demick became one of the first women surgeons in the country and was one of the first women physicians to treat women's patients specific needs. This biography gives Demick her rightful place in medical, women's, and world history. Before Susan begins, I want to let you know that this talk is being recorded and will be uploaded to our YouTube channel in a few days. She'll speak for 30 to 45 minutes and then there will be time for questions. For the
003Q&A portion, a staff member will walk around with a microphone for you to use since this talk is being recorded. And we have assisted listening devices available if you need one. And without further ado, I'm happy to present Susan Wilson. Thank you and welcome you hearty souls. Okay, I'm going to get started. This is the the cover of my new book. Uh it's just been out for about four months and uh I'm going to give you a a view of the entire history of this and then you won't have to buy the book. You can know the whole story. Okay. Uh this is where we have to start. We're in the 19th century. Um, and uh, this is how I like to depict what I call the sad state of health care for women and
004children in mid-19th century America, but also in Boston. Okay, what's the problem here? The problem here is that it's all guys. Okay, the medical profession was well, in 1860 there were something like 55,000 male doctors in the United States and only 300 women. And this was because women weren't um expected to leave the women's sphere or the the the domestic sphere. They weren't expected to go into the public sphere, let alone to be professionals in something like this. By the way, for Bostononians, the second guy from the left, the cute little one there, that's Oliver Wendell Holmes. Um we think of him as a poet, but his day job was he was a physician and he also taught uh at Harvard Med. So um just to give an example of why this was a problem
005um male doctors in general did not understand women's problems or so-called diseases of women. This is an actual illustration from a textbook on how to give a physical to a woman. Okay, we're talking about Victorian times. No wonder they didn't have a clue what was going on. and numerous women when the few the few women were able to get some kind of education or apprenticeship to make themselves doctors uh so many of the women had really advanced diseases and they said why didn't you go to a doctor and and they would often say oh I could not go to a man for this thing so clearly we needed to have women doctors but there was this prejudice against that um we had one of the most prestigious and still do medical schools in the United
006states. Uh this is Harvard Med. Now, you probably don't recognize this because if you look at the image, uh on the lower left, you'll see the Charles River and you see an inlet and it says Mass General Hospital and the Medical College. Um Ma the Bullfinch building of Ma of Mass General was right on the edge of the water. This is before all the landfill and uh the parks on the side of the uh parks on the side of the Charles River. And they were right next to each other, which was very convenient at the time. And I've seen images of patients being brought in on boats and brought either to Harvard Med or to Mass General because because they were right on the edge of the water. And at that time the Charles was
007still tidal and therefore you can see that they're they're on pilings and sometimes it would go all the way up to the top of the pilings. But this was the gold standard in the Northeast. Now the woman who decided in New England to change all that was an immigrate from Berlin. Her name was um Dr. Marie Zakvska. It is very very often mispronounced. If you look at it, you go Zachka. And so even her friends called her Dr. Zach uh because it was easier than pronouncing that. She um had great aspirations to be a doctor when she was living in Germany. Was not allowed to have any kind of doctor's education, but could become a midwife. And she went to the top of the heap out there as a midwife, but she really wanted more
008than that. And one of her adviserss said, "Come to America. I think if you come to America, you may be able to become a doctor." And so she did. And she went to New York. And uh she did some odd jobs there along with her sister, but she connected with these two sisters, the Blackwell sisters. And I, if you know anything about medical history, Elizabeth Blackwell and her sister um created the first hospital in America by women for women. Um, and Dr. Well, Marie Zakvska helped them to build that hospital, helped them to fund raise for that hospital, um, and was very inspired by that and they got her into the back door of what's now called Western Reserve so she could actually get her medical degree. So, she helped them create the very first
009hospital uh, doing that. And then then she got a little restless and she decided um she had been fundraising and while she was fundraising they had sent her up to Boston because they said you know in Boston there's a lot of really progressive people and I think you can get us money for the hospital. So not only did she get money for the for the women down in New York but the people in Boston became enamored with Dr. Z or Dr. Zakvska and said um you know what why don't you work here? why don't you do something where we can get more women doctors treating women patients up here? And so uh many of her pals supported her. She decided in order to uh look competitive with her the male doctors that she had to
010get a horse and buggy. Uh she bought a used horse and well I don't know what a used horse is. She used got a used buggy and a horse so that she could go out and do rounds and treat people. but she wanted to create something, a place, a hospital where women could be trained as interns and really get hands-on practice um and be able to expand the career. Now, her dad back in Berlin was not terribly supportive. He was one of those people um that believed that women should stay at home and take care of the kids and you can, you know, you can bandage wounds at home, but you shouldn't be out in the professional world. a famous letter for him. If you were a young man, I could not find words to
011express my satisfaction and pride in respect to your medical career. But you were a woman, a weak woman, and all that I can do for you is to grieve and to weep. Oh my daughter, return from this unhappy path. Okay. So, she wasn't getting a lot of support from her dad, but she was from a lot of other people, both men and women. and she got enough support together that she uh figured out how to create a hospital and she did create the New England Hospital for Women and Children. Um I'm jumping ahead here, but this is the place that is now the Dimmick Center in Roxberry. Okay, it began as a hospital. Um however, the original location was on Pleasant Street in Boston. Uh the streets have changed around there. It it's about it's
012very near to where Blue Man Group is today. Okay. Um the Charles Playhouse. So um that's where she set up in some small chambers there the very first hospital by women for women. And her idea was to furnish women with medical aid from competent physicians of their own sex. Okay. Even though there were several male physicians especially from Harvard um who came over and helped out and really believed there were people who were against women being physicians but there were plenty of people who were for it. So they helped her out as well. She wanted to give educated women the opportunity for practical study because even if women could sneak in the back door and get some kind of medical education in some of the more liberal schools, um virtually none of them had practical
013education. Virtually none of them had touched a human body even though they graduated from medical school. So she wanted a place where there were actual patients there. And she also wanted to establish a professional training school for nurses. And we'll talk about this later, but nursing was not really a profession at the time. It was more like an avocation or something women who were kind of desperate or you know were widowed and had no monies of their own or were from really tough circumstances would go into it, but it wasn't really a profession. Okay? But we'll get more into that later. Now there were people who were opposed to this. There were many people including doctors and uh one particular member wrote this that he he warned of that certain equilibrium that varying from month
014to month in each woman unfits her from taking those responsibilities which are to control the question of life and death. Okay. This is a reason women should not be doctors. So there were people like that. However, there was all kinds of support. Again, we're in very progressive Boston, okay? There was all kinds of support. It wasn't necessarily monetary. Um, there's a name you recognize on the top, the Welds, who have The Welds have been here since 1635. This is one of the oldest families, and there was one who occupied this territory for some time, as you remember. Um, anyway, cooking pears, old linen, apples. So people didn't necessarily give money, but they gave as much support as they could to the hospital in any way that they could. Um, but one of the people who
015gave a great deal of money was Mrs. Robert Gul Shaw. Um, and you know Robert Gulsh Shaw because he's across the street. Okay. The Shaw 54th Memorial. This was his mom and their family was very wealthy, very progressive abolitionist. And uh they left that bequest and there should you have forgotten what's across the street. There's uh her son, Robert Garshaw. Um, okay. So, this is the millia into which Susan Demick entered. Here's a picture of Susan Demick. She was born in 1847 in Washington, North Carolina. Um, for those of you who don't know Washington, North Carolina, um, I'll look here. >> There. So, it's the eastern part of North Carolina. It was the original Washington. Then another place um 25 years later copied the name. Um very small town. Um a lot of shipping was
016important. There were ships going in and out to Boston, to the West Indies, to South America. Um and uh Susan there lived there as a an only child of a northern father and a southern mother. Um, at that time in Washington, North Carolina and in much of the South, in much of the nation, people didn't believe girls should have education. They could learn some basic things. But this is the same prejudice against women becoming doctors. So, there weren't even any primary schools that women could go to, even though Susan liked to read a lot and many people called her a prodigy even at ages four, five, and six. So her mom, who had been a school teacher, which was acceptable to do, her mom, who'd been a school teacher, started tutoring her at home, and
017then went, you know, Susie needs more than this. She needs more than just me teaching her. So what she did was she created a female school of her own so that Susan could have comrades in the classroom with her. And she taught all these young girls and it's very impressive. She taught him reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, grammar, history, natural philosophy, chemistry, botany, and piano and guitar. So this was a very talented woman. Okay? A strong woman role model for little Susan. Um, now what was equally important as her mom was teaching her this and she was learning and reading, um, one of the things she did was she decided to learn how to, uh, read Latin because she had this intense interest for some reason in medicine. And this was uh the gentleman across who
018lived across the street from her, Dr. Solomon Samson Satchwell. You can't invent a name like that. Okay? And he took Susan, little Susan, under his wing because she cared about medicine so much and loaned her all his medical books, many of which were in Latin. And uh so she learned how to read Latin, studied with him, and he liked her so much that by age 9 and 10, she was going out on house calls with him into the countryside, helping him in in his medical profession. By the way, some doctors, that's the only way they got their education at that time. Um this is a picture of how people remember Susan. Um like sitting under sitting under a tree reading some hefty book in Latin about medical history. So, uh, she was quite the talk
019of the town. Now, she grew up in Washington, North Carolina in the 1850s, which means that she was there in the period of slavery. And where she grew up in Washington, North Carolina, um, about 45% of the of the population were enslaved African-Americans. Um, and it turns out, um, her father ran a newspaper called the North State Wig. And even though he was a northerner, he didn't really, it's said that he was anti-slavery, but he ran these rewards for fugitive slaves all the time. So, it's kind of unclear. Her mom, on the other hand, had grown up with a family who owned enslaved individuals working for them. So, there was this conflict in her family as well as in her town about the pros and cons of slaver slavery. Um, we know that her family
020when she was growing up did have about a half a dozen enslaved people. They owned a hotel called the Lafayette Hotel. And so this wasn't as perhaps as awful as working out in the fields, in the cotton fields, which did exist in town and in the neighboring towns, but still this was something Susan became aware of. Um, and she was also very aware a aware that her town was a major stop on the Underground Railroad. And this was partly because uh they were on the waterfront and many many African-Americans both free and enslaved and both worked there did work on the ships doing caulking uh being sailors uh doing ship building. So, it was a very easy way to mix in the enslaved and the free populations and therefore for people to escape. And uh
021there's an image just showing a variety. And you couldn't necessarily tell the difference between who was free and who was not, which again aided the escapes. And perhaps because of that, perhaps uh because she saw what was happening in her own home, Susan uh when she was about eight years old, she said, "I was very slow to realize uh the evils of slavery. It wasn't until I was 8 years old. Um I think that's pretty young." Um and later by age 11, she actually announced that she was an abolitionist, which was a pretty strong thing for an 11-year-old kid living in the anti-billum South. So, in the midst of this, when Susan's a young teenager, the Civil War came to Washington, North Carolina. And uh her town was occupied by Union troops. In fact, her
022hotel was occupied by Union troops. And um so this is actually the only image we have of the place that she lived. I don't know if you can see that on the left, but it says the Lafayette Hotel, and these are some Union troops coming in there. But actual battles happened in her front yard. Um and uh it was must have been a very terrifying time as Confederate troops and Union troops were going back and forth. Um and troops things were being fired from gunboats in the river and it was uh it was frightening. Um in the midst of that Susan's beloved father died. Now he was not killed. Uh we have reason to believe that he might have had some kind of a throat cancer. Um, and the only reason we've been able to
023figure that out is I did u spend time down there going through some old general store um uh merchandise purchases and her dad had a lot of painkillers and particular ointments that he was purchasing. The problem here was Susan's mom, even though she supported her, she thought you should do something that is acceptable for women if you want to have a career like teaching. And her father said, "Sue says she wants to be a doctor and I say she may." So her primary support being her dad, very different from Dr. Zach's dad, okay, had died. And this was this was a troubling thing. The next thing that happened in 1864, okay, you may remember the Civil War lasted for 1861 to65. In 1864, as the Union troops decided that it was no longer viable to
024stay in Washington, North Carolina, as they were leaving, a fire broke out. Um, and the fire just ripped through town. And Susan and her mom were among the people who would go down, a bunch of the women, cuz most of the guys were gone into war, would go down and bring buckets of water in to try to throw them on buildings and stop the fire. They did stop it, but less than two weeks later, another fire started in their own backyard, an accident, and their entire house burned down. Much of much of uh the town had burned down, so they had to leave. And it turns out that they had relatives up in Massachusetts. So she and her mom, since her dad was deceased, uh went ahead and somehow, we still don't know how because
025it was in the midst of the war, somehow got to Massachusetts to find her aunt. And they ended up in Sterling and then in Hopkin and then finally in Boston. And there are sites in all of these places that have remnants of the Dimmick staying there. In Sterling, Massachusetts, when she got there, she discovered there were two really famous people in town. One of them named Mary Smooyer and one named Ebenezer, excuse me, Mary Sawyer and the other one Ebenezer Butrick. Does anyone recognize those names? Yes. You betcha. Nice. Okay. And Butrick, anyone do sewing when they were younger? Those tissue patterns. That's the guy. Okay. So, yes, the actual Mary of Mary had a little lamb. And yes, it really happened. Okay. and Ebenezer Buttric were the two rock stars of Sterling, Massachusetts. But
026um and there's a very good chance that uh Susan grew up singing Mary Had a Little Lamb because it was very well established by the time she was born. But more important was finding her aunt uh Maria Demikman. And this is an image I was able to find of the place where she lived. And it turns out that um that's a picture that I took there that um the place is exactly the same as when Susan came there. And what's particularly interesting is is that Susan's aunt and uncle were both abolitionists and this was an abolitionist meeting place. In fact, her uncle was William Lloyd Garrison's dentist. Okay, so small world. Um anyway, so one of the things we discovered when I met the woman who owned this house was that she had found by
027knocking on a wall that sounded very empty. They cut open the wall and found a staircase going up to the attic. And uh if you can see at the bottom, I should have taken a better picture, that's a chair at the bottom, so it's actually elevated. They believe and have good reason to believe that this was a stop on the Underground Railroad um and that they could get enslaved people into that secrets hiding place up into the attic. So um yet another encounter with the Underground Railroad. So we have Susan's aunt and uncle. Okay. Um there through them they met another abolitionist family called the Greens and uh Bessie Green became Susan's closest companion for the rest of her life. um through them of course they met William Lloyd Garrison who ended up being best
028friends with Dr. Marie Zakvka. So suddenly we have this connection between this young girl who loves uh would love to become a doctor and a woman who has actually already created a hospital where women doctors treat women patients. Um and that's we don't have any pictures of her best friend uh Bessie Green but that's from Mass Historic. one of the many letters that we found of hers. Bessie Green, by the way, was the cousin of Robert Gulshaw. Okay, it's just a really small world here. Um, she went next went to Hopkin, which is best known for for the marathon. Okay, which was not happening at that time. Okay. Um, and Hopkin at that time was huge in in shoe and boot factories. and her mom deciding that they were going to be in Massachusetts for
029at least a while because the Civil War is just winding down and they can't go home because everything's burned down at home. Um, she decided, well, I know how to run a hotel. And so what she did was she found a hotel in Hopkin because there were so many shoot by shoe and boot buyers and sellers coming in and out all the time. So she created a hotel on one of the main streets in Hopkin. Um, what's interesting is that we discovered from the mass state census in 1865 that I don't know if you can see this, but halfway there's a bunch of dimmicks here in the census and about halfway down it says um, uh, Lewis and Ellen Demick and then in the right hand column it goes BLK. They were both black. And
030so um we have we have since discovered that both of them had been enslaved in Washington and the Dimmicks brought them up with them uh during the war. So technically they were contraband. So um so this is perhaps more evidence that Susan really was an abolitionist and helped these people get away from North Carolina. Susan took a job for a while um teaching in a local school even though she herself had never even graduated from a high school. but she was smarter than almost everybody else who had uh but she still said you know I'll help out with the finances but I really really still want to be a doctor. So what happened was her friend Bessie connected her with Dr. Zach. Dr. Zach wanted someone with way more education to come in and kind
031of intern where her women doctors were treating women patients. But Susan again knew so much more than all these people who had even been able to get into some medical school. So they let her into the hospital and she became an intern there and she was so good that they said, "Okay, we need to get you into a really highquality medical school and we think the medical school here is Harvard. We're going to get you in." Okay. So they applied to Harvard Med. But this, by the way, was the building that they were living in uh or down on Warrington Street near the Charles Playhouse where the hospital was at that time. and she got um this letter back from Harvard basically saying no provision has been made or ever or now exists for the
032education of women in any department of our university. Um this was in 1867 that Susan was turned away from Harvard. By the way, we know she was more qualified than most of the guys. Half of the Harvard male class of 1868 could not read. Just just for frame of reference, okay? But they refused, Susan. And here's my favorite part, and my friend here already knows the answer. Does anyone know when uh Harvard finally started admitting women into its medical school? 1945. Exactly. Yeah. So, if Susan had been 98 years old, she could have applied there to the medical school. So they found out that an experiment was going on in Zurich because there were many progressive people in Zurich and they applied there uh to her and she got in and uh this is the
033letter that she wrote to them basically being kind of gutsy and saying if I come to Zurich and I'm allowed in your medical school will I get all the same privileges as the men? And they wrote back and said yep and she went and it was true. And uh here's an image of Zurich when she arrived there in 1868. And this is the place where she went to medical school in a in a building called the Polytenicum. That's what it looked like where uh when she was there and that's what it looked like when I was there four years ago. So it's pretty cool to be just walking into history. It's still the same. and she became one of seven women from around the world who were accepted as an experiment into the medical school
034with equal opportunity to the guys. And this is the whole gang. We we're from Russia, Scotland, England, uh Switzerland. Um and uh basically what happened was each one one of those women excelled at what they were doing. Each one most of them finished in only a portion of the time it took a lot of the other people to graduate. The norm was five years. Susan graduated in three, finished all her coursework, got honors, and all of them went back to the respective countries, um, and were basically rock stars in the profession and helped other women begin to come into medicine. So, these are a lot of the original pioneers of women getting into medicine. And, uh, one of her classmates said that she had a a unique mixture of Yankee grit and southern charm, which
035got her a long way. um another of her best friends. The American is a remarkably accomplished person for her age. She seems so soft and childlike and yet her whole manner is one of decisiveness in her thinking and her acting and she quite impressed everyone. Uh one thing that's interesting I found because I'm curious about things that happen all over the state. Um we discovered uh that uh there were no dormitories at that time. So people often found families from their home country living there and she discovered this family that she described in her letters as the D family from Waltham. It turned out uh from some research that uh it was Alfred Luh Lufkin Dennis who she stayed with and he was from Waltham and he was the founder of the Waltham watch factory.
036Why was he in Switzerland? Watches. Okay. So uh small we just the the world keeps getting smaller. Um this is her dissertation. Some of the papers I got to see that she had written. By the way, remember how she learned Latin to study medical uh books. She taught herself German because all the classes were in German and she had to write her dissertation in German. So she taught herself German. Okay, she was smart. Did I mention that? Uh and this actually is her her uh her diploma. And I was holding her diploma in my hand and photographing it. And then I said, "Wait a sec. Why do you have her diploma?" And because these are all at the time like hand printed one at a time. And the uh archavist there said, "Oh, the students
037always lose their diplomas. So we always print two copies in case they lose one and want to get another one." So that's how I got to see her diploma. So after she finished med school with honors, she decided even though it wasn't necessary to get more education by visiting the medical establishments in both Vienna uh and in Paris. And one of the people she wanted to see was the surgeon, Dr. Theodore Bilroth. If anyone here is in a surgeon, this is like the surgeon surgeon, the god of all surgeons. um ahead of his time and uh she wanted to watch him, listen to him, absorb as much from him as she could. Um among the things that he was doing that was unusual in the medical profession, we're right on the cusp of the scientific
038era of medicine. We're not quite there. We, you know, we don't quite germ theory has been discovered but not proven. So people don't know about sepsis, antisepsis. Dr. Bill Roth was among the people who said, "We have better results if we wash our hands." Okay. Um there were doctors at that time who would move from dissecting a cadaavver to delivering a baby and not wash their hands. They were not wearing gloves. They were not wearing masks. They were not wearing caps. It was it this was still evolving. Okay? There was people didn't understand germs. We don't have aspirin. Okay? So, we're still we're at the end of the antique era of medicine. Um, another person she was influenced by in Vienna was Ignaz Semlwise who fought and fought and fought and blamed a lot of
039doctors for deaths, especially in maternity wards. There was this disease called porperal fever, p ue p r a l fever. And um it it often if it hit if a woman got it, she could get very very sick in a huge amount of pain and possibly die. And once it got in a maternity ward, it spread rapidly. And these guys were saying, "We can cut that down if we wash our hands." But a lot of people said they were crazy and didn't accept what they were doing for a good 10, 20 years. But Susan was influenced by them. And she also blew away a lot of these guys she was working with. Uh, one of her doctors that she met in Vienna. The question whether a woman can be fit for the study and practice
040of medicine has been definitely answered by the appearance of Dr. Susan Dimmick. So she was impressing people across the Atlantic. She came back to Boston. This is what Boston looked like at the time. Okay. So this is just down the street. It's still um it's still hardpacked dirt. Okay. Uh going up Beacon Street. Um we still didn't have uh okay public transportation. We had trolleys but they were horsedrawn trolleys at the time. there was not yet electricity. This is like 1872 when she comes back. Um and uh she came back. She left in 1868. Okay. Went to went to Europe, studied, came back. When she came back, women were emerging as a major force in Boston. Among the various people that had become super famous in her absence, the woman in the upper left, I
041think her name is Louise May Alcott. She had a bestseller. Okay. All right. down below her, Julia Ward. How uh she was like, you know, she had was already famous for Battle Hymn of the Republic, but uh but she was with women's groups, with suffrage groups. She was huge in the area. She was a a big shot that a lot of people followed. The upper right, Lucy Stone, who in Susan's absence had begun a a newspaper called the Women's Journal, uh which was the most influential suffrage and women's journal in the United States at the time. And then the lower right, Ellen Swallow, later Ellen Swallow Richards, who was the first woman admitted to MIT and then made space for more women coming into MIT. So all of this had changed in the four years.
042So when she came back as an independent strong woman wanting to be a doctor and a surgeon in particular, she was in great and supportive company. Um what had happened in the meantime is that little place down near Blue Man Group had moved out to this gorgeous hooded or h excuse me um uh side of a campus up in Roxbury which was gorgeous. Roxbury was beautiful. There were lots of wealthy people living there. There were beautiful homes, beautiful lands, and uh they opened the campus, which is where the Dimmick Center is today because they were serving such an important uh purpose for Boston and for all of New England. That was the first building built. I don't know if any of you have seen the Dimmick Center, but that's what it looks like today. It's
043still there in its gorgeous high Victorian splendor. Um and this was the hospital building um where Susan came back and worked. And the deal was her friends at the hospital and other friends had put together money, so had her mom to send her to Europe. And uh the deal was when she came back, she would become the resident physician as well as the chief surgeon at the hospital. So she began her residency and they were going to have the grand opening of the new hospital. But a couple of things happened. First of all, we had the great episodutic, the ecquin flu, where most of the the horses in Boston were down with the flu. Many of them died and we were dependent on horses for everything. Okay? And so they went, "Let's put off our
044opening." They put it off and then the town burned down. Okay? Because then happened the great fire of 1872. It was a rough fall in Boston that year. So they did put off the opening again and finally had the grand opening of the hospital. Luckily, the hospital wasn't in downtown Boston. It was out in Roxbury. So, they had the grand opening. There's an early image of it. And here's some images. Um Susan had learned and the doctors had learned a lot about air and space and light. And again, even though germ theory hadn't been established, they all knew that if there was a lot of light, a lot of air, fresh air, um trees, greenery, that their patients seemed to get better. And that was all incorporated into this new hospital. Um they had a
045maternity ward. This is an actual basket of babies. Um and women everywhere wanted to come here to have their babies. There was a competitive hospital Boston lying in which was male doctors serving uh women patients. They had to close for 15 years because they kept having outbreaks of corporal fever. Guess who was not washing their hands? Okay. Um, what's interesting for someone who came from the slaveolding south was her first mi maternity patient was an African-American woman from Boston and she became godmother to this woman's child and even gave a toy that had managed to escape with her from uh North Carolina and gave that little doll to the child and they were close for life. um descriptions. I'm sorry, you probably can't read that. Of Susan at this time that she was, you know,
046that the descriptions of her, she was gentle, she was talented, she was persuasive, she was um the best of professional life, uh and the best of being a woman as well. And people were kind of blown away by all of that. One of the important things that she brought back that hadn't been in Boston at the time was clinical thermometers. And uh she brought these back. This looks small, but the the clinical thermometers at the time were a foot long and you stuck them under your armpit for 15 minutes. Okay? And what she did that she had learned in Europe was they didn't have a staples at the time where you could buy graph paper. So the students and the nurses at the hospital once she became resident, every night when they were done, she
047would give them pencils and paper and they would draw graphs so that they could track the temperatures of their patients. This hadn't been done in Boston before. And they found out that there were amazing results if they could watch how a patient was going dayto-day with the thermometers and the graphs with tools like this. Okay, very simple scalpels. Okay, Susan did some amazing surgeries and I'm hoping you can see that fairly well. Um, this was a little girl in 1873 who came in from Nantucket. People, it wasn't just from Boston. People came from all over New England to this wonderful hospital. This woman had a giant or the girl had a giant tumor on the side of her neck with apparently 72 little lobules inside it. Susan using ether did a surgery, excised all of
048those, sewed it up, and the girl survived. Can you see that? Okay, the difference between it's an astonishing thing. And this was at a time when before and after pictures were not common. Okay, so they had a photographer come in and do these images. And this was published, the announcement of this was published worldwide. And one of her great friends um there were several very prestigious male doctors who kept supporting the hospital and kept pushing back at the people who said women can't do this. And Dr. Kitt said it was not merely her skill that was remarkable, but also her nerve that qualified her to become a great surgeon. It was one thing for a woman to become a doctor. That was a big deal. But to become a surgeon was a level way above
049that. The other thing that she brought back with her was the idea that we really needed to have skilled nurses. That a great doctor was wonderful, but unless you had a trained nurse, it wasn't going to be good. And again, as I mentioned before, nursing was not really a profession. It was more like an avocation and nothing anybody studied for a long time to do. So influenced by the surgeon surgeon Theodore Bilroth and meeting with Florence Nightingale when she was in Europe, she came back and said we need to have professional nurses. So among the things she did when she came back was she took this little naent nursing school that they had there and professionalized it, made it a year-long, divided it into quarters with different specialties, had lecturers come in and um actually
050gave diplomas. Um this is something we we it's hard to imagine today, but um uh she had to spend a lot of time going to people's homes and talking to them and telling them if you're a nice girl, if you're a well- educated girl, if you come from a good family, this is a good profession. One of the things that set it back and this diagram illustrates that is in Belleview Hospital in New York uh looking for nurses. They went to the local prison and told the prostitutes that they could either stay in prison or become a nurse. What did they want to do? And so um these people were not necessarily trained. Uh they just decided maybe this is better to be in this situation even though I don't know very much than being
051in jail. So she had had to do a lot and succeeded in convincing people this was a serious profession that people could go into. Um these are some of the lectures she had various doctors at the hospital offer to the students through the year. And she graduated personally and study and taught the person who became known as the first professional nurse in the United States, Linda Richards. and she's such a big deal that her her her uh nursing costumes as well as her uh certificate, her diploma are all at the Smithsonian. If anyone's in nursing, you probably have heard of this woman. Um and there's her diploma at the Smithsonian. Um several years later, although Susan didn't personally teach her, um the New England Hospital graduated the first African-American her uh nurse in the United
052States, and that was Mary Liza Mahoney. Now, a lot of people again thought it was wrong for women to be in the public sphere. If you were a professional, anything, there was something wrong with you. And there's so many things written at that time that call women like this manly, unsexed. Um, and then they met Dr. Dimmick and all these words are written about her. Utmost femininity, peculiarly sweet voice, gentle yet firm expression, ladylike, engaging manners. it didn't fit what they thought was wrong with you if you decided to be a professional. Um I have to admit though that um among one of the things that one of her uh colleagues said about her is she ruled her hospital like a Napoleon. So she was very sweet and gentle and warm. But yeah, she was
053tough. She was tough as well. So anyway, people expected women doctors to look like this. And here's Susan with her puppy. Um anyway, the hospital continued to grow. It continued to be very very important and uh it was the only hospital in Boston with obstetrics, gynecology and pediatrics under one roof for many many years. Um she got burned out. Okay, she was working. She was living at the hospital in order to pay off her debts be from going to med school. She had her own private practice in downtown Boston. And after three years, she was exhausted. And so she and her friend Bessie Green and one other woman who had studied nursing decided that they wanted to take a trip to Europe. And Susan wanted to go to visit her old pals over there in
054Europe, but also to buy all the great new medical instruments because Europe was far more advanced than America was at the time in medicine. And this is a letter that she wrote to a doctor, a woman doctor in England basically saying how lucky she was. And she had not one wish fulfilled. She feels very very fortunate as she's leaving. So the gang went down to New York, got on a very modern steam ship called Schiller and went across the Atlantic. And it was very lovely for the first few days. They were aimed towards the English Channel so they could drop people off north in England, south in France, and go on to Germany. It was about an 8-day trip. And as they were approaching on the lower left there, the um the southwest corner of
055Cornwall, uh there was an area called the Isisles of Silly, which had, you know, a lighthouse and and a good way to figure out where you're going. If you were in trouble, you could stop at the Isisles of Silly. But if the weather was bad, as it got, it got very, very dangerous. And as they got closer, um they were not able to navigate because it became very dark, very windy. They couldn't see the sun, they couldn't see the stars. and navigation at that time you needed to see the sun or stars to know where you were. Um and uh they got encountered very very rough seas along with the fog and um this is a contemporary image that a photographer uh in Cornwall shared with me of what the waves are like around the
056isisles of Silian Cornwall. They're wretched. So, if you can't see and waves start happening like this and then you lodge yourself on some subterranean piece of those islands, um, you're in deep trouble. And this is an image of Schiller getting near the lighthouse but not even knowing that they were near the Bishop Rock Louse off the aisles of Silly. And they set off distress signals, but it was inconsistent at that time as to whether it was just reporting that you were coming or if you were in danger. And nobody really knew that the ship was in danger. There were 372 passengers and crew aboard. Only 37 of them survived the wreck. In Boston, everyone knew that Susan was a strong swimmer and kept saying, "Susan's going to be one of them. Susan's going to be
057one of them." But women and children first did not even exist at that time. It was more that concept is really a 20th century concept and it was more every man for himself. Only one woman survived and it wasn't Susan. The same uh Dr. Kat who told how exceptional she was. One of our eminent surgeons Dr. Sam Samuel Kat said to me yesterday, "This community will never know what a loss it had in Dr. Dmick." Um some of her friend doctors from London came down. They found her body floating. uh they embombed her and brought her back to Boston, memorialized her in a small book that had a lot of her letters and some brief bio material about her and obituaries. Um they instituted at the hospital something she would have cared about, a free
058bed. Um over at Forest Hill Cemetery in Jamaica Plane, they had a beautiful headstone and a wonderful ceremony for her. Um they took some a couple of images of her and hired a painter to create a beautiful portrait which still hangs at the Demick Center today. And Codman Street was the name of the street that it was on today and they changed the name to Demick Street to honor her. Um back in North Carolina, that's me visit my first visit there. They have a marker to show where her house was at that time back when she lived there. And they also have a Dimmick Street down there. That isn't Susan Demick. That's South Dmick. Okay. There's a South and a North Dick down there. Um anyway, the New England Hospital where she'd been such an
059integral part existed for 107 years. It lasted till 1969 and then it really couldn't compete with all the high-priced and very very luxurious hospitals growing up in Boston. So, it segueed and became a community health center, which it is to this day. And there's an image of the Demick Community Health Center still serving a community that wasn't adequately served, just a different community than when Susan was there. Um, in the legacies, uh, it says, "In the beginning of our work, it was received as an axiom that women might become skillful physicians and midwives, but never be equal to the demands of surgery." Dr. Susan Dimmick was the first in our city to prove the fallacy of this opinion. Her example was not lost. For many, a bright young woman has since chosen this branch. So,
060she was an inspiration. The very first women admitted to the Mass Medical Society, which would not accept Susan, were all from the New England Hospital. And the first women admitted to the American College of Surgeons, were all from the New England Hospital. So, it was an essential part of women being accepted into the world of medicine. And that's our girl Susan. She died, by the way, at the age of 28. Okay. Any questions? [Applause] Any questions? Yes. This gentleman, by the way, was born at the New England Hospital for Women and Children. Um, the letters that I've got are from all over the place. I traveled around the world um researching this. Uh the Dimmick Center itself has very few. A lot of their archives, especially 19th century, are at Smith College in the Sophia
061Smith collection, but some of those letters I found in Zurich. Some I I discovered uh um a distant cousin of Susan's who had some of the letters in hand and sent me Xerox copies. So, they're from all over the place. Some are from the Harvard archives. Well, it was 25. He mentioned Margaret Fuller. 25 years earlier, Margaret Fuller, another woman who didn't go by the rules, you know, and did things that women weren't supposed to do, died on a ship coming back from Europe. Um, and when Susan died, several of the articles in the paper said, "Not since Margaret Fuller died, you know, has another woman of such import died." And of course, all women are of import, of course, all people are. But they compared it to Margaret Fuller cuz it was exactly 25
062years. Margaret lived to be 40. Um, Susan was only 28. Thank you very much. Thank you. Other questions? This is my old friend Richard. And I just wanted to say Richard um I I uh used to write a history column for the Boston Globe. And Richard was uh one of the ace librarians there who helped me out all the time. This actually began even though I only worked on this book for the past seven years. Um this began as an article in the Globe back in 1995. And I'm sure Richard you helped me at the time. I'm sure you did. You have a question. >> How did I do it? >> Yeah, it um Okay. The the short form is is back when I was working for the Globe, um I had written this I
063had I used to Richard and I were reminiscing about this. I used to go down to the BPL and flip through old newspapers because this is like 1994. This is before Google. This is before anything like that online research. And I used to look for ideas for stories by looking through old newspapers. And I started seeing these front page articles about this awful shipwreck and how upset everyone was. and not and in Boston in particular, they were talking about Dr. Dimmick, how they lost this person. I found the New York Times, New York Times gave this shipwreck an entire front page of details and then follow-up. So, it was like this is a big deal. So, I actually wrote a story for the Globe that ran in the city weekly. My that column was called
064History Notebook. And um and I discovered in doing the research that Susan's grave at Forest Hills was disintegrating. It was made of a kind of marble that was really beautiful but was just not being able to stand up to acid rain. So I um so I got together a bunch of friends in the historic community and we fundraised and got people to learn more about Susan Demick and actually ended up because we couldn't fix the gravestone got a woman from the historic burying grounds initiative in Boston to help us carve a replica in granite. And so the stone there today is a replica carved in granite. And then I did lectures and stuff for about a year and then went on to other stuff. And 20 years later, okay, 2015, um a woman who I've
065worked with for years at the Boston Women's Heritage Trail, Mary Smooyer, called me and asked me to do a lecture about Susan Dimmick for Women's History Month because that's when we do lectures about women, right? And um and I said, "Mary, I haven't done a lecture about Susan Dimmick in 20 years. In fact, it's so long ago that my lecture was slides." Okay. And she said, "Susan, you're going to have knee surgery soon and you're going to be in bed for 3 weeks. What better have you to do than to write a new lecture?" So I did. I delivered the lecture at the JP Historical Society. I There was a snowstorm. I was on crutches and on drugs. And there was a standing room only crowd and everybody afterwards said, "Ah, this is great. Can
066I buy the book?" And I went, "There is no book." Um, short story long or long story short, um, I found out that Brandeise had a women's studies research center where you presented them with an idea to become a scholar there, um, related somehow to women. And I said, I'd like to write the first biography of Susan Dimmick. And I was accepted. So the past seven years on the side of my regular work, I've been doing that and yes, traveled around the world to do it because I was obsessed. Somebody had to tell this story. It's too good a story. And this, by the way, guys, is tip of the iceberg. There's so much more in the book. Was that too long, Richard? Okay, we still have a couple of minutes. Any other questions? Thank
067you so much. Thank you. I'm loving that. Um, we will, if anyone is interested, we have some books for sale in the back. Um, we're selling them for $35, which is a discount. Um, uh, and, uh, we will accept cash, check, or Venmo if you're interested. And I'm happy to sign them if you'd like. Thank you guys. Thank you, Susan, for a fascinating talk about a fascinating woman. And thank you to all who joined us and who tuned in from afar. We hope we will see you back here on April 10th when we'll be joined by Anna Dub to discuss her book, Microlastics and Me. Um, thank you again, Susan. And as she just mentioned, if you're interested in purchasing a copy of her book, they're available in the back. Thanks everybody. [Music]