Theodore was born in New Orleans to Theodore John Dimitry Sr. and Irene Scott. His great-grandmother was
Marianne Celeste Dragon a mixed Creole of partial Greek ancestry. She founded the Dimitry Family along with Greek
Andrea Dimitry which was a mixed-race Creole family that endured countless racial hardships during the 1800s. Theodore's father attended Georgetown along with other prominent Creole family members. His father's first cousins included
George Pandely and
Charles Patton Dimitry. By 1901, Theodore Jr. obtained a degree in medicine from Tulane University and married Fernande Jacobs on August 28, 1901. Theodore was the resident medical doctor inspecting fruit at the ports of the state of Louisiana in 1903. In 1910, he joined the
American Medical Association. During the 1911–1912 school year, he was listed as a lecturer and clinical assistant in diseases of the eye at Tulane University. Early in his academic career, Theodore published articles about complex medical procedures in the field of optometry. He was the oculist for the
Southern Pacific Railway of New Orleans in 1913. One year later, he was chief of the eye division at
Charity Hospital a position he held for the next thirty years. Theodore was the oculist of the New Orleans public schools in 1915 and that same year his accumulated published research included work on
cataract extraction and tarsal massage for patients suffering
trachoma. Theodore was also a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans a position he held for the next twenty-five years. He made recommendations to the delegates of the Louisiana State Medical Society in 1917 and in 1919 he was part of a Diagnostic Clinic in New Orleans. That same year he was elected a member of the
American Journal of Public Health. Around the same period Theodore published research in the field of artificial eyes namely improvements to the Snellen artificial eye. During the 1920s he continued his research and was chief visiting ophthalmologist to Charity Hospital and in 1922 he was also elected president of the visiting staff of surgeons and physicians to the same institution. He published his research relating to glaucoma and
enucleation of the eye in the papers entitled
The Tarsus Made Pliable as a Cure for Glaucoma and
Eviscero-neurotomy with an Endothesis as a Substitute for Enucleation. By the 1930s Theodore was a pioneer in the field of optometry and invented the Dimitry erisiphake to remove cataracts from the eye. The device worked on a vacuum principle. Around the same period, he published
A Vacuum Grasping Instrument for Removal of Cataract in Capsule and
The Dust Factor in the Production of Pterygium. Ahead of his death, he was the head of the ophthalmology department at Louisiana State University and also the head of the ophthalmology department at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. Theodore was sick for one year before his death. He died at 66 years old in New Orleans. He was buried at
Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans. His two sons Dr. Earl Dimitry (1910-1995) and Dr. Theodore Joseph Dimitry Jr. (1906-1982) continued his legacy. ==Literary work==