Theodore Dimon

He practiced in Berkshire County, MA and Utica, NY before moving to Auburn, NY to be resident physician at the Auburn State Prison. He was at least briefly in California looking for gold about 1849. In 1860 he was a 43 year old physician in Auburn, NY. He enrolled there on 17 May 1861 and mustered as the Surgeon of the 19th New York Infantry on 22 May. They were redesignated the 3rd New York Artillery Regiment on December 11. In June 1862 he was detailed as Surgeon to the 2nd Maryland Infantry.

He treated wounded soldiers at a field hospital in a "barn built of round poles and covered with thatch" near the Lower Bridge at Antietam on 17 September 1862:

My barn was crammed very soon and Dr. Reber of the 48thPennsylvania, a good surgeon and plucky and cool, came in to help me. A singular thing happened here. Our amputating table consisted of a small door mounted on two barrels. I had just severed the Captain’s leg above spoken of, and I had an artery of the stump in a pair of forceps, and Reber was adjusting the ligature on it, when two fragments of one of the numerous shells that were bursting over and coming through our thatched roof came down between our heads and hands and the stump, without touching anything and plunged into the blood and the straw at our feet...

One man was brought in who was in an uncontrollable restless state, constantly throwing himself about unconsciously onto others lying beside him. I had to strip him and wash him, for he was covered with faeces, to find his wound, when, behold, he had no wound discoverable, and no bone broken and yet the looked as he was dying. Stimulants had no effect and he died in half an hour. This was, doubtless, one of those cases that used to be called ‘windage.’ He was doubtless struck on the chest or over the liver or abdomen very obliquely by a cannon shot which, though it does not tear the clothes or show marks along the skin, yet the parts underneath are found in a state of disintegration...

The action, so far as we were concerned, began about 11 a.m., for I was looking at my watch just before I went down and it was just then 11. About two, as we had finished dressing all in the barn and provided for them as well as we could, I went out to look around. The firing had held up in our vicinity and gone over the other side of the river.

Besides fingers and toes I have made eleven amputations here of legs, thighs, forearms, arms at shoulder joint. The minie ball striking a bone does not permit much debate about amputation. It is more destructive than small grape, for it flattens up and then commutes the bone and drives the fragments into the neighboring soft parts... We have had three deaths, two from Minnie (sic) shot through the lungs, and one poor fellow from the 2nd Maryland from tetanus the third day after I cut off his arm...

He returned to the 3rd New York Artillery in October 1862 and mustered out on 2 June 1863. He assisted in caring for wounded soldiers after the battle of Gettysburg as a civilian volunteer, and was instrumental in organizing what became the creator of the Gettysburg National Cemetery. He was afterward an agent of the Relief Service to the end of the war.

He went back to his medical practice in Auburn and was reappointed surgeon of the State Prison in 1869. In 1879 he became superintendent of the Asylum for Insane Criminals. He retired from that appointment in 1882 and was President of the county medical society that year.

His service from the State of New York.1 The quotes above, from his wartime diary, found in Nelson.2 Personal details from family genealogists, the US Census of 1860-1880, and James I Robertson Jr.'s A Federal Surgeon at Sharpsburg in Civil War History (June 1960; also Nelson's source). His gravesite in Auburn and a cenotaph in Fairfield, CT are on Findagrave.

He married Sarah Watson Williams (1818-1895) in September 1841 and they had 3 sons, all born in Auburn.

Dr. Dimon was William Henry Seward's personal physician before the war and his oldest son Theodore Williams Dimon (1844-1875) was Sewards's personal secretary at the State Department from October 1864.

09/19/1816; Fairfield, CT

07/22/1889; Auburn, NY; burial in Forest Hill Cemetery, Utica, NY