Needham Physician, Advocate for the Blind Honored in Mural
August 1, 2025
• A Needham native born three centuries ago is the subject of the newest rotating mural by the Town Common.
Needhamites have earned acclaim for their baseball prowess, flower cultivation and trips beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Another notable resident received renewed recognition in the newest installation of the “Needham and the World” mural series, which made its debut on Sunday.
Dr. John Dix Fisher, born in Needham in 1797, co-founded the Perkins School for the Blind, the first of its kind in the country, in 1829. Helen Keller, along with her tutor Anne Sullivan, attended the school.
During a period of rapid growth and discovery in the medical field, Fisher brought foreign advancements state-side, including Braille and Braille machines. As a physician, Fisher also contributed to research on smallpox and helped to implement anesthesia during childbirth, according to the Perkins School.
Paul Good is chair of The Needham Community Revitalization Trust Fund, the group spearheading the ongoing effort to spotlight locals who have made a positive impact. Good said Fisher brought back new technology and medical tools to the United States “simply because of his curiosity and his desire to be able to constantly learn and bring new things into the world.”
Three Needhamites are featured each year on a mural displayed for four months on Chapel Street across from the Town Common. Fisher’s mural is the ninth, succeeding, notably, astronaut Sunita Williams, the founders behind Life is Good, Red Sox third baseman Frank Malzone and former Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker.
“Basically, we found out there were a whole lot of people who have lived in Needham over these last 300 years and right up to right now, who have lived in Needham for quite a while, went off into the world and did amazing things,” Good said at the unveiling.
Fisher studied medicine at Harvard University alongside Dr. James Jackson, a founder of Massachusetts General Hospital, where Fisher himself would later serve as an acting physician.
Upon moving to Paris after medical school, he worked with pathologist Dr. René Laennec, who invented the stethoscope, which Fisher introduced to the U.S. Paris’s L’Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles, a school for blind students, served as inspiration for what would become Perkins.
Fisher founded Perkins — then called the New England Asylum for the Blind and based in Boston — with Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the school’s first director.
The Needham History Center and Museum considers Fisher to be “an advocate for medical reform.”
“In Paris he learned about the use of statistical data as a means of identifying trends in disease and treatment; he brought that method back to America as well, and was one of the founders of the American Statistical Association,” Executive Director Gloria Greis wrote. “He helped pioneer the subsequent systematic collection of health information and vital statistics that made possible major advances in public health and preventative medicine in the mid-1800s.”
Fisher’s older brother, Alvan Fisher, found success as a landscape and portrait painter. The pair both lived in Paris after the younger Fisher graduated from Harvard — “So while Alvan was sketching [Lafayette’s Chateau] La Grange, John studied with French physicians,” Greis wrote.
After his passing in 1850, Fisher’s legacy lives on at Perkins, which last year connected with more than 1.2 million children across the globe, according to research on the mural. A monument at his grave calls him “The Early and Efficient Advocate for the Education of the Blind” and “The Physician and Friend to the Poor.”
Seymour Levy, a graphic artist who designed the mural, said he felt compelled to feature the stethoscope in the design — it’s something almost every doctor wears around their neck, Good said before unveiling the mural.
“I wanted a dynamic presentation of people in medicine,” Levy said. The mural also touches on people around the world whom Fisher worked with, including Laennec, Howe and Valentin Haüy, who founded L’Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles.
On the project, Good said “it’s created incredible history and it all started in Needham.”
“[By sharing these stories] the kids could realize that it’s not just sleepy little old Needham,” he said, “but people use this as a platform to be able to go off and do really incredible things and contribute in amazing different ways to literally millions of people in the world.”
Abigail Meyers is a senior at Simmons University, where she serves as editor-in-chief of The Simmons Voice.
