Background
Dick-Read, Grantly was born on January 26, 1890 in Beccles, Suffolk, England. Son of Robert John and Fanny Maria (Sayer) Dick-Read.
Dick-Read, Grantly was born on January 26, 1890 in Beccles, Suffolk, England. Son of Robert John and Fanny Maria (Sayer) Dick-Read.
Student Bishop’s Stortford College, Hertfordshire. Bachelor of Arts with honors, Saint John's College, Cambridge, 1911, Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery, 1916, Master of Arts, 1916, Doctor of Medicine 1920.
Educated at Bishop"s Stortford College and Cambridge, he was an excellent athlete and horseman. He received his medical training at the London Hospital, Whitechapel, where he qualified as a physician in 1914. During World War I, Dick-Read served with the Royal Army Medical Corps.
He was badly wounded at Gallipoli but later served in France.
In the early 1920s, he worked at a clinic in Woking and it became very popular. Dick-Read specialised in childbirth and care, observing and writing up case histories and notes.
He published his first book Natural Childbirth in 1933. Dick-Read"s ideas were at first ridiculed, and he was expelled from the London clinic he had set up with a group of fellow obstetricians.
When the Woking partnership was dissolved in 1934, Dick-Read set up a private clinic at 25 Harley Street.
His second book, Revelation of Childbirth (which was later retitled Childbirth without Fear), was published in 1942, and aimed at a general readership. lieutenant became an international bestseller, and it is still in print. Dick-Read was invited to give lecture tours all over the world.
He moved to South Africa in 1948.
In 1953 he returned to England and continued to lecture and write. In 1956 the United Kingdom Natural Childbirth Association, now called the National Childbirth Trust, was founded.
lieutenant became the foremost charity concerned with birth and early parenthood. Grantly Dick-Read was its first president
In 1957, a phonograph album featuring Dick-Read and entitled Natural Childbirth: A Documentary Record of the Birth of a Baby was released by Argo Records in the United Kingdom and Westminster Records in the United States. lieutenant is still available as a Civil Defense from Pinter & Martin.
He died on 11 June 1959 aged 69 in Wroxham, Norfolk, at a riverside home that previously had been owned by the United Kingdom ukulele entertainer George Formby. A memorial plaque on Dick-Read"s former clinic at 25 Harley Street was unveiled on 11 June 1992. Dick-Read has been criticized for being anti-feminist.
In his book Motherhood in the Post-War World he wrote, "Woman fails when she ceases to desire the children for which she was primarily made.
He also claimed that "primitive" women did not experience childbirth pain, although he did not define "primitive" and never watched women in childbirth in "primitive" societies. Anthropological research has suggested that painless childbirth is not common among so-called "primitive" cultures.
Member Royal College Surgeons, Royal College Physicians.
Married Dorothea Cannon, April. Married second, Jessica Bennett, April.