27 Mar 2026 March’s Office Artifact: 1989 Beacon Hill News, “Historic Boston Inc. preserves the best of the Old Boston”
Our office artifact of the month is a 1989 clipping from the Beacon Hill News, spotlighting HBI’s work on the 1872 Zakrzewska Medical Building in Roxbury!
The building is now at the heart of the Dimock Community Health Center, but was once the New England Hospital for Women and Children, the first hospital in New England to be run by women doctors. HBI raised $562,000 in grants towards a $2,000,000 rehabilitation project of the decorative Victorian structure, in addition to attracting additional funding from the Boston Globe, and finding a new steward in the Dimock Community Health Center.
The health center was named for the street it sits upon, but Susan Wilson’s recent biography, Women and Children First: The Trailblazing Life of Susan Dimock, M.D., revealed for whom the street was originally named: the renowned Boston doctor, Susan Dimock, who was one of the first women to be recognized as a surgeon in the United States.
She practiced at the New England Hospital from 1872 to 1875. In 1875, Dimock died in a shipwreck off the coast of England at the age of 28. Her funeral and burial at Forest Hills Cemetery were covered by the press and resulted in accolades and condolences from around the world. In 1884, the street that the New England Hospital sat upon was renamed Dimock Street in her honor. What she accomplished in her lifetime paved the way for women in medicine across the nation.
Thank you to the women who persisted.
Happy Women’s History Month!
