Illustration by Catarina Moreno (www.catarinamoreno.com)
Dr. Helen O. Dickens (1909 – 2001) is best known for being the first African-American woman admitted to the American College of Surgeons, but her hard work, perseverance, and legacy extend far beyond that achievement. As a champion of women’s health care, especially for young women of colour, Dickens made it her mission to reduce the prevalence of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases through education. From humble beginnings rose a powerful woman at the forefront of obstetrics and gynecology.
Helen Octavia Dickens was born in Ohio, United States (US) on February 21, 1909. Her parents grappled with the challenges of raising a family on low wages, which unfortunately was a common story in those days. Decades of exclusion, injustice, and racism towards people of colour in the US left many families like Dickens’ struggling. Her father, a former slave, was self-educated and committed to ensuring his daughter received an education. Although racial segregation in public schools was technically prohibited, one legislative ruling cannot undo generations of intolerance and systematic inequality. So, even though Dickens attended a desegregated high school, she still suffered racial discrimination. But she persisted and refused to let these systems of oppression stand in her way. She registered for medical school and earned her M.D. from the University of Illinois in 1934. She was the only African-American in her class. When at 79 she was asked about her childhood dream of becoming a doctor, she replied:
“It was what I wanted to do, and I didn’t see why I couldn’t do it. You just had to do what you had to do to get the job done”.
After graduating from medical school, Dickens began her residency in obstetrics at Provident Hospital in Chicago, an inclusive hospital with the mission to provide the predominantly Black community with high quality medical care. A few years later she moved to Philadelphia, the third largest Black community in the country at the time, to work at the Aspiranto Health Home. She cared for the poorest members of the community, often without charging, delivering babies, running parenting classes, and helping young women of color navigate teen pregnancy. “My career in medicine has been inspired mainly by the badly needed services to youth in the black community”.
After spending several years at the Aspiranto Health Home, she jumped at the chance to continue growing and developing as a doctor, and enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Medicine, earning a Master’s degree. Upon her return to Provident Hospital in Chicago in 1943, she married Pervis Sinclair Henderson, a fellow resident. Finally, after a brief stint at Harlem Hospital in New York City, she officially became Dr. Dickens in 1947 and the first African-American certified OB/GYN in Philadelphia.
She returned to Philadelphia a year later and her career took off. She was hired as director of the Mercy Douglass Hospital Department of OB/GYN, where she continued her impactful work on women’s health using what she believed was a very powerful tool: education. She taught young women about sexual health and helped them gain control over their bodies and their lives. Her work was incredibly important then as it would still be nowadays, as Black women have some of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the US, and are more than twice as likely to die during childbirth than white women. Over the next few years, she added a couple of “firsts” to her collection, becoming the first African-American woman to be nominated a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, and the first African-American faculty member of the department of OB/GYN at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
Dickens’ tireless work to prevent teen pregnancy and educate young women on sexual health led to the creation of the ‘Teen Clinic’, one of the nation’s first clinic for pregnant teens. Her clinic offered counselling, educational classes, prenatal care, and group therapy services to young mothers. Another pioneering public health initiative implemented by Dickens was a cancer screening program that encouraged doctors to perform Pap smears for detecting cervical cancer – the number one killer of women in the US in those days. Pap smears helped to lower the rate of cervical cancer incidence and deaths in the US, and are such an effective way to detect this cancer that they’re still routinely used today.
In 1969, Dickens was appointed Associate Dean for Minority Admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked with people of color to encourage them to pursue medical careers. In just five years into her new role, the minority enrollment had increased by 64%. She spent the remainder of her career at University of Pennsylvania, where she worked her way from associate professor to professor emeritus and associate dean of the School of Medicine. She received numerous awards for her research on uterine cancer and for her advocacy work, including awards by the American Medical Women’s Association, the American Cancer Society, the National Association of Medical Minority Educators, and the Frederick Douglass Society.
Dickens died in 2001, but her life, research, and extensive work with women of colour and those from low-income communities continues to be impactful today. The Teen Clinic was renamed by the University of Pennsylvania, and now her legacy lives on at the Helen O. Dickens Center for Women’s Health.
Sources:
https://cfmedicine.nlm.nih.gov/physicians/biography_82.html
http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1017.html
https://almanac.upenn.edu/archive/v48/n15/deaths.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2762353/#S1title
