At the close of the American Civil War, she moved with her mother to Sterling, Massachusetts, where she attended a girls' school and undertook an ambitious reading of every medical textbook she could borrow.

On January 10, 1866, Dimock entered the New England Hospital for Women and Children, where she began to learn medicine by close observation in the wards and dispensary.

[2] Despite her unstable financial situation, Dimock decided to go to Vienna with fellow Zurich medical graduate Marie Bokowa for a few months, where she met Auguste Forel and C. E. Hoestermann.

Dimock, Bokowa, Forel, and Hoestermann called themselves the Wiener Quartett (Vienna quartet) and planned on meeting again in July 1875 in Zurich.

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.

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.

- The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, XIX:30 (1926) In 1939, the North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development erected a historic marker in her honor.