Background
John Dix Fisher was born to Aaron and Lucy (Stedman) Fisher at Needham, Massachusetts. He was a younger brother of Alvan Fisher.
Boston physician a pioneer advocate of education for the blind
John Dix Fisher was born to Aaron and Lucy (Stedman) Fisher at Needham, Massachusetts. He was a younger brother of Alvan Fisher.
After graduation from Brown University in 1820 and from the Harvard Medical School in 1825, he gave two years to professional study in Europe, chiefly in Paris, paying special attention to auscultation under Laennec, the author of it, and becoming one of the first in America to utilize this aid to diagnosis.
Although his own political views were conservative and inclined far more toward nationalism than toward sectionalism in any form, his sympathies in the Civil War were with the Confederacy because he felt that the South as a section had been unfairly treated- by the North as a section.
Fisher was one of the early members of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
From investigations made abroad he issued, soon after his return, a book with illustrations, Description of the Distinct, Confluent, and Inoculated Smallpox, etc. (1829), which humanitarian, was horn in Philadelphia, to a position of social and financial security.
In the Reconstruction measures of Congress he saw only injustice.
After the war he gave liberally of his personal wealth to rehabilitate the fortunes of members of his wife’s family who had lost all they had in the conflict.