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Robert Latou Dickinson was born on February 21, 1861, in Jersey City, New Jersey. He was one of five children of Horace Dickinson and Jeannette (Latou) Dickinson. His father, a hat manufacturer, was a descendant of Nathaniel Dickinson, who came from England to Massachusetts in 1634. His maternal grandfather had immigrated to the United States from Scotland in the early nineteenth century.
Robert attended the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and studied for four years in Germany and Switzerland. He received his M. D. from Long Island College Hospital (later the Long Island College of Medicine) in Brooklyn in 1882, and after brief internships began a private practice in gynecology and obstetrics.
Beginning in 1883, Dickinson held a number of clinical and teaching positions at Long Island College Hospital. Although his first post was in the chest department dispensary, he became assistant obstetrician in 1884, lecturer in obstetrics in 1886, assistant professor of obstetrics in 1899, and professor of gynecology and obstetrics in 1918. He also served as obstetrician at King's County Hospital, Brooklyn, 1894 - 1899; as gynecologist surgeon, 1897 - 1910, gynecologist, 1910 - 1912, and eventually senior gynecologist, 1912 - 1935 at Brooklyn Hospital; and as obstetrician-in-chief, Methodist Episcopal Hospital, Brooklyn, 1905 - 1911.
Dickinson was an examiner in 1885 for the Brooklyn Police Department and, in 1890-1897, for the Brooklyn Civil Service Commission. These experiences, together with his World War I service, probably contributed to his concern for establishing standards of "average" physical character and behavior. During World War I, he was the assistant chief of the medical section of the Council of National Defense (1917) and, with the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Army Medical Corps, served as medical advisor to the Army General Staff from 1918 to 1919. In 1919 and in 1926, he headed missions to China for the United States Public Health Service. In 1940-1942, he lectured at Vassar College.
He was co-editor of the American Textbook of Obstetrics (1895) and gained wide recognition as a teacher; at one time three of the four chairs in his specialty in New York City were occupied by his former assistants. Not content with the usual methods of instruction, Dickinson used his remarkable talents as a sculptor and illustrator in his teaching. To demonstrate the techniques of delivery, for example, he used "babies" made of rubber, and he taught female anatomy with the aid of his "gyneplacques" of the vagina and uterus.
His presidential address to the American Gynecological Society, in 1920, noted with concern "the threat of eclipse of the gynecologic guild, " especially by surgery. In a plea both to improve the quality of treatment and to preserve gynecology and obstetrics as distinct medical specialties, Dickinson urged the standardization of nomenclature, periodic recertification of specialists, and greater attention to women's interests - especially contraception - that gynecologists had theretofore largely ignored.
In the 1890's he wrote several articles demonstrating the harmful effects of the then fashionable styles of women's dress - especially steel-ribbed "health waists" and heavy, superfluous layers of underclothing. He also encouraged women to get more exercise than was then considered proper for genteel ladies.
From at least 1890 onward, he fought against cultural taboos that inhibited women's erotic lives, including the notion that sexual urges were shameful, and against the general condemnation of autoeroticism as unnatural and unhealthy. Convinced by his experience as a practicing gynecologist that women were frequently the victims of sexual maladjustments deriving from ignorance and superstition, he early advocated a scientific program of sex education.
In 1923 he founded the Committee on Maternal Health (which in 1930 became the National Committee) to gather data on contraception. Throughout the rest of the decade, he tried repeatedly but unsuccessfully to persuade the birth-control leader Margaret Sanger to allow accredited physicians to play a more active role in her New York clinic. Sanger, reluctant to lose control of the clinic she had so laboriously built, rebuffed Dickinson, thus frustrating his efforts to gain greater respectability for birth control in the medical profession and to involve doctors more directly in the search for improved contraceptive techniques. Nevertheless, Dickinson's standing in his profession, his influential position as a fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, and his publications under the auspices of the National Committee on Maternal Health - particularly Control of Conception (1931) and, with Woodbridge Edwards Morris, Techniques of Conception Control (1941) - did much to secure eventual medical support for birth control. He died of pleurisy at his daughter's home in Amherst, Massachussets.
Robert Dickinson was perhaps the most eminent American gynecologist of his day. He developed several new surgical techniques, including the use of electric cauterization in the treatment of cervicitis and in intrauterine sterilizations. He also was among the first physicians to use aseptic ligatures for tying the umbilical cord. In 1946 Dickinson received the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation Award for his original work in birth control.
Dickinson was an active member of the American Medical Association, the Planned Parenthood Federation, the American Association for the Study of Sterility, the American Association of Marriage Counselors, the Euthanasia Society, the National Sculpture Society, and the American Geographical Society.
Dickinson's associates recognized him as a humane, enlightened gentleman who brought unusual intellectual vigor to his many professional concerns.
On May 7, 1890, Dickinson married Sarah Truslow, daughter of a Brooklyn banker, who later helped found the Travelers' Aid Society and the national Y. W. C. A. They had three children.
