It’s easy to imagine what a monumental adventure it must have felt like when Mary D came to Block Island in the late 1950s. After all, that island was not the Block Island of today. The population during that period had dipped to about 500, less than half the number of year-round residents today. The ferry ran twice a day, six days a week. Although the island did have an established tourist economy, the season was short, and many islanders subsisted on farming and fishing. Mary had been assigned by the state as the Block Island community visiting nurse, a position that came with more questions than answers. Perhaps most notably, Block Island did not have a regular doctor, which meant Mary became the primary source of all medical care.As the island’s visiting nurse, Mary D was in people’s homes and often working out of her car or her own house. She became intimately familiar with the island’s medical needs, and she realized that the medical infrastructure, in which the island’s doctor (when they had one) lived and worked out of the Captain Noah Dodge House, was no longer meeting the community’s needs. Patient volume and the number
