Robert Latou Dickinson

Robert Latou Dickinson (February 21, 1861 – November 29, 1950) was an American obstetrician and gynecologist, surgeon, maternal health educator, artist, sculptor and medical illustrator, research scientist, author, and public health educator. He also became a prolific artist, carver, and sculptor, who used his skills to illustrate his professional work.

Early life and education Robert Latou Dickinson was born on February 21, 1861, in Jersey City, New Jersey, as a boy of ten, Rob Dickinson was trying to beach a boat that he and his father had built. An eddy drove the metal prow into Dickinson's abdomen, gashing it deeply. Holding the two sides of the wound together and some internal organs inside, Dickinson dragged himself to shore; his injury was stitched by a lay person, but it took a long time to heal and a scar remained for the rest of his life. Thereafter, Dickinson determined to become a doctor.

He attended the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and studied for four years at schools in Germany and Switzerland, sketching and studying classical art all the time. After his return, Dickinson studied at the Long Island College Hospital, and received his medical degree in 1882. He interned at Williamsburg Hospital.

Dickinson was one of the first physician-scientists to obtain detailed sexual histories of his patients. A painstakingly accurate pen-and-ink artist, he made many drawings and sketches during a patient interaction. Such sketches included drawings of the patients' genitalia. Over his career he collected about 5,200 sexual case histories. Dickinson was the medical illustrator for many medical publications and textbooks. He used electric cauterization for the treatment of cervicitis and for intrauterine ablation for sterilization.

In the 1920s, he closed his practice and focused on sexual research and contraception, and other public health education. In 1923, Dickinson founded the National Committee on Maternal Health. This society addressed problems of infertility, birth control, and sexual behavior. Dickinson was particularly interested in homosexual desire in women, which he believed was a threat to heterosexual procreation and marriage.

Over the years Dickinson changed his assumptions about what constituted perverse sexual behavior. By 1934 he would write that homosexuality "has been stressed far beyond its numerical significance or its importance as a harmful interference with normal response. Physiology is teaching us that we are all in some degree bisexual and that we possess some sex traits other than those characteristics of our overt type, with two series of stages between extreme masculinity and complete femininity." He said that "To stamp [female homosexuality] a 'perversion,' instead of a deviation or deprivation, is to lack a sense of proportion, if not sound judgment." He also said, though, that women's "non-marriage and non-mating" was a "social and biological thwarting," constituting "the frustration of love-comradeship, child-rearing and home-making." He expressed no awareness of how women were faced with the male-dominant legal requirements for marriage, assigning women responsibilities for child-rearing and home-making from which men were exempt, and no awareness on the impact to children of this distortion.

As a supporter of birth control and the eugenics movement, he gave professional support to Margaret Sanger, In the late 1930s, he began a collaboration with the sculptor Abram Belskie, resulting in the creation of many life-size medical models. Their Birth Series, depicting the processes of gestation and delivery, was displayed to crowds at the 1939 New York World's Fair, and copies of the sculptures were distributed world-wide. They had three daughters, one of whom died in infancy.

Throughout his life Dickinson fascinated family and friends with his sketching; In addition to numerous published medical drawings, he made thousands of sketches of places, trees, vistas, figures, and boats, notably in parks, on mountain trails, at Squam Lake in New Hampshire, and in China. One of Dickinson's folios was full of colored sketches of gaily painted Chinese junks. Many sketches were converted into frontispieces and cards.

Dickinson was, all his life, a vigorous outdoorsman. He enjoyed swimming and diving, doing backflips at Squam Lake well into his eighties. He also worked for many hours a week, improving hiking trails at Squam and helping friends and family with outdoor projects.

Dickinson and his wife and family walked and hiked, sailed and canoed all over the world, in China, in Europe, in Washington DC (where he was briefly Acting Surgeon General), on Squam Lake, and in New York City. He illustrated many editions of the New York Walk Book and published Palisades Interstate Park, written and illustrated by him in 1921 for the American Geographical Society of New York.

A man of deep Episcopalian faith,

Models The Dickinson-Belskie Obstetrical Model Collection was acquired in 2007 by the Warren Anatomical Museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It comprises over 200 medical models, including Normman and Norma, intended to represent the average American man and woman.

The Birth Series was on public display for decades at the Boston Museum of Science, but its current location and status are unknown .