By Greg O’Brien
Special to the BIR
Few in life have come so face-to-face with a calling as Dr. Martin Joseph Dunn. At 75, he’s a hands-on symbol of selfless love and sacrifice.
A Jesuit product to the core, a graduate of BC High, where he is serving his ninth year on the Board of Trustees, and Boston College, Dunn is co-founder of Por Christo (For Christ), a charitable medical service organization that organized and supervised 60 voluntary medical missions to South America and republics of the former Soviet Union to provide life saving dental care and facial surgery to the needy from 1979 to 1994.

A private practice Dorchester surgeon at the time, Dunn raised more than $5 million to subsidize traveling medical teams, M*A*S*H-type units, of up to 30 fellow surgeons, anesthesiologists, and operating room and intensive care nurses, and to support healthcare and medical clinics throughout the world.
For his efforts, he was the recipient of Ecuador’s top humanitarian awards, was knighted by Pope John Paul II into the order of Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice, was inducted into London’s Royal College of Medicine, received White House citations, was a George Washington Medal of Honor award winner, and was even appointed a Kentucky Colonel. But who’s counting? Certainly not Marty Dunn.
“It’s payback time,” he says of his career. “If people hadn’t helped me, I wouldn’t be where I am today. You must be there for others. That’s the Jesuit philosophy.”
Dunn’s most celebrated example of his outreach is Alexandra Balcazar, who at six months was abandoned in 1984 at a hospital in Quito, Ecuador. Born deformed, remnants of a jaw were fused to her skull, and her mouth was clamped shut. She was taken to a Catholic orphanage where nuns had to force feed her with mashed food through the gaps of her baby teeth and at times through a feeding tube to her stomach.
“She couldn’t’ open her mouth,” says Dunn in an interview in a second-floor BC High conference room. “Her mother left her at the hospital because she couldn’t feed her. The child was going to die. She then had a tracheotomy just so she could breathe.”
Dunn, the son of an Irish-born church sexton, was in Ecuador at the time on a two-week Por Christo medical mission when he received an urgent call from Margarita Perez de Hurtado, then Ecuador’s first lady, to examine the girl. At first glance, Dunn knew she would require sophisticated surgery, and arranged to fly her back to Boston. In a seven-hour operation at Cardinal Cushing Hospital in Brockton (now Good Samaritan Hospital), Dunn, taking a cue from the Almighty in the Garden of Eden, fashioned a lower jaw from two of Alexandra’s ribs. All that was missing from the operating room was Michael the Archangel.
“Surgery in children is unforgiving,” says Dunn. “You can’t make any mistakes.”
There were no missteps. A day after the surgery, Alexandra was sitting up in bed and eating ice cream.
Word of the miraculous surgery spread, and soon Dunn’s heroics were the subject of two Good Morning America interviews, a Reader’s Digest cover story, a People Magazine profile, a story in Family Circle and countless other clips. Dunn and his wife, Carol, whom he took to his junior prom at BC High, ultimately adopted Alexandra, who then needed facial erector sets to hold her new jaws in place. She is now a 29-year-old licensed EMT, and is employed with Fallon Ambulance as a chair car driver. She has no trace of any deformity.
Tracey, the Dunn’s older daughter, now lives in Cohasset where she owns and operates the Village Wine and Spirits shop.
Facial medical skill is a blessing, but it comes from years of extraordinary life education and training from places like BC High and BC, where Dunn was enrolled in pre-med and pre-dental courses, Tufts University School of Dental Medicine, a didactic course in oral and maxillofacial surgery at Tufts School of Graduate Dentistry, an internship and residency at Boston City Hospital Medical Center, and mini-residencies at the Clinic St. Andre in Nancy, France, the Royal Dental College in Copenhagen, Louisiana State University, and the University of Zurich in Switzerland.
Given that he is a former consultant to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., the Eisenhower Army Medical Center in Augusta, Ga., Veteran Administration hospitals, and the United States Public Health Hospital, among others, one might think that Dunn was a child medical prodigy. Hardly. There was a time in his young life when he was on track to split rocks in The Rower, a small country village in Kilkenny where his father, James, and grandfather, Michael, hailed from. His grandfather was a road laborer.
was born in North Quincy, the oldest of five boys, but his growing-up years were complicated by death and marriage. His mother Kathleen (Bulger), with roots in County Carlow, died from breast cancer when he was 11 years old. He remembers the night. “The family doctor came at about 10 p.m. after I was in bed,” Dunn recalls. “He pronounced her dead, and then I heard my dad crying. I didn’t leave the bedroom.”
And just like that, “The next day, I became the cook, and the four younger brothers paired up in twos to wash the dishes,” Dunn says, noting the Irish like to keep it simple, even in death.
It was his dad’s second marital loss. He had four children with a first deceased wife, Julia (Flood), and then he married yet again, this time to Rose (Kelly), another Irish woman. The couple had a daughter Rosemary, who still enjoys a close relationship with Dunn. Two of Dunn’s biological brothers, Francis, a career Navy electrician, and Vincent, a sheet rocker, are now deceased. His brothers Paul, a cabinetmaker, and George, formerly employed in the Boston insurance business, are retired. In all, Dunn’s father raised ten children; coincidentally, he was one of ten.
James Dunn(e) emigrated to Boston when he was 17, traveling on a “potato boat” in steerage with less than $20 in his pocket. He protested loudly when a Boston immigration official misspelled his surname, dropping the “e.” After being told he would be sent back to Ireland for such whining quicker than you could say Galway, he kept silent, starting a new life in this land of opportunity where the Irish need not apply—thus leaving it up to his son to make bigger name for himself.
Dunn’s father, who left school after the sixth grade, initially worked in Fitchburg in the paper mills before settling into North Quincy and delivering groceries in Neponset for “Muck” O’Keefe, who became a founder of the First National Stores company. His first long term employment was at the Tubular Rivet and Stud Company in Wollaston, then he worked as a custodian at St. Ann’s Church for 26 years.
“A very religious man, he opened the church at 6:15 every morning and closed it at 8 p.m., never missing a day of Mass or Holy Communion,” recalls Dunn, who mirrors his father in looks and personality. “From the age of six, my brothers and I assisted him dusting and cleaning the vigil lights.
“Dad never swore, although I remember hearing him say, ‘Dan,” a few times. And he never drank. But I do remember on that rare occasion of a social obligation when he took a glass of wine, which he downed like medicine. He was strict, but a deep, kind person. I attribute the strictness to the fact that on two occasions, he was left with a young family. He had to be a disciplinarian. He kept us all on a short rope.”
But his heart always exceeded the glower. Dunn’s dad was an active member of the charitable St. Vincent DePaul Society, and every Saturday he purchased 60 loaves of bread to deliver to needy Wollaston families in the parish. Martin would often accompany his father on the bread runs.
The younger Dunn doesn’t remember much about his biological mother, born on Prince Edward Island— aside from her being a loving woman and an excellent cook. She would bake for the corner small grocery store near North Quincy High School that Dunn’s dad ran as a side business.
After his mother’s death, Dunn, not much of an athlete (a casual football, baseball and basketball player), fumbled his way through the ninth grade. “I was focused on knocking around, just having a good time.” His academic record was appalling, by his own admission. But when the Lord closes a door, he often opens another. Dunn’s stepmother Rose, in a bold move, directed the floundering Dunn to enroll at BC High and to pay for the tuition himself. Shape up or ship out, and don’t let the door hit you in the derriere, was the message received.
No one had to draw him more word pictures. Dunn cut lawns and bagged groceries to pay for the $180-a-year tuition, a princely sum then. “The experience at BC High and working hard to pay the tuition changed my life,” he says.
While attending Boston College, he continued to bag groceries, and later at Tufts, he worked 40 hours a week in the Dorchester Center Post Office. The superintendent, John Grandfield, was a BC grad, and he took a liking to Dunn, creating a custom work schedule that allowed him to work Friday nights and all day and night Saturdays, driving a mail truck, and on Sundays working as a “weekend superintendent” sorting the mail, as well as on holidays and vacations. Boston Irish Reporter Publisher Ed Forry replaced him on that job, for which Dunn insists he set the performance bar.
Dunn later set the performance standards at Por Christo, now a member of the Caritas Christi Health Care System. Responding to Pope John Paul II’s plea on Boston Common in 1979 to “come follow me and help others,” Dunn and his surgical teams engaged in surgeries up to 12 hours long to assist those in critical need. They also set up pediatric and newborn intensive care and burn units, examined thousands and thousands of patients, and worked closely with building contractors to plan new medical facilities. Dunn, who had visited Guatemala in 1975 with his wife and daughter Tracey, was duty-bound by the devastating earthquake the following year, and spent two weeks in the rubble with a medical team assisting with care and teaching Guatemalans emergency medical procedures and public hygiene.
In all, 56 of Por Christo’s trips under Dunn’s tenure were to the South American countries of Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru and for were to assist republics of the former Soviet Union. A month after the Soviet Union dissolved, the Lithuanian Children’s Relief Program implored Dunn to set up a mercy mission for emergency operations and to train surgeons in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
Far from the other side of the world today, Dunn, who just celebrated his 75th birthday at an inspiring BC High reception in his honor, is still engaged in medical care, working five days a week in southern New Hampshire and northern Massachusetts as a regional oral and maxillofacial surgeon for Aspen Dental.
Asked if he plans to retire soon, he flashes a cold stare: “No,” he replies, stating that he remains motivated by a desire to serve and by the love of his wonderful wife, Carol, whom he met 60 years ago. She sang in the choir at St. Ann’s and taught Sunday School. “She was good looking, and I was on the move,” he says with smile.
His wanderings have since ceased; the couple has been married 53 years this month. And Dunn, if he has his way, is staying put. His father, he notes, split wood up until he was 87. “I hope I have his genes,” he says.
After three quarters of a century, Martin Joseph Dunn is ever open to the calling of the Lord. Reflecting the Jesuit philosophy, he hopes an accounting of his life attests to the reality that he was here for others. “If someone needs something or is in trouble, I’d meet with them,” he offers without a moment’s hesitation.
Greg O’Brien is president of Stony Brook Group, a Brewster-based publishing and political/communications strategy company. A regular BIR contributor, he is the author/editor of several books and writes for various regional and national publications.