The hospital's goal was to provide patients with competent female physicians, educate women in the study of medicine, and train nurses to care for the sick.

Once she was 18 she applied to study midwifery, which was the only part of medicine women were allowed to work in, at the Royal Charité Hospital in Berlin.

This led her to go to Boston to meet with the board at the New England Female College, where she was offered, and accepted, a position as a professor of Obstetrics, and Diseases of Women and Children and the head of the clinical program.

With the help of members of the board of the New England Female College as well as Ednah D. Cheney (legal sponsor), Lucy Goddard (legal sponsor), Mrs. George G. Lee (donated $3000), and Samuel E. Sewall (donated $1000), she opened the New England Hospital for Women and Children on July 1, 1862.

All staff and doctors that worked there were women until 1950 when a lack of money led the board to reverse the policy.

She is one of the women who sent a letter to the founder of the MIT, in January 1867, requesting to "continue the study of Chemistry in the Technological Institute.

"[2] Dr. Fanny Berlin, who was later appointed as the hospital's chief surgeon, was also one of the first Jewish-American women to practice surgery in the US.

It was named after Susan Dimock, a resident doctor (surgeon) at the hospital who drowned in the shipwreck of the SS Schiller on May 7, 1875, when she was 28.

From the center's historic nine-acre campus located in the Egleston Square section of Roxbury, Massachusetts, and several satellite locations, The Dimock Center provides access to healthcare and human services that include: Adult & Pediatric Primary Care, Women's Healthcare, Eye and Dental Care, HIV/AIDS Specialty Care, Outpatient Mental Health services, Residential Programs, The Mary Eliza Mahoney House shelter for families, pre-school, Head Start programs, after-school programs and Adult Basic Education & Workforce Training programs.