AAHM 2025

G2. Roundtable Revisiting the American Physician Dr. Robert L. Dickinson: Exploring his Contributions, Critically Examining his Legacy  
Chair: Sarah Rodriquez, Northwestern University  
 
Rose Holz, University of Nebraska 
Wendy Kline, Purdue University 
Beans Velocci, University of Pennsylvania 

Over the course of his long and varied career, Dr. Robert L. Dickinson (1861-1950) was a prominent and deeply influential American obstetrician-gynecologist, scientist, sexologist, and artist. In addition to helping Margaret Sanger win the medical profession over to the birth control cause in the early twentieth century, he was deeply engaged in many other issues of “women’s” health, sexuality, and eugenics. He also served as a friend and mentor to, and the intellectual bridge between, prominent sexologists Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters, and Virginia Johnson. Consequently, not only does he regularly appear in scholarly accounts on birth control, abortion, sterilization, clitorises, lesbianism, and menstruation, but medical historian Vern Bullough declared that he might be regarded as “the founding father of much of American sex research.”

Despite Dickinson’s significance, his work and legacy remain yet to be fully synthesized and critically examined, particularly in ways that don’t fall into the trap of traditional hagiographies of great white male physicians. Thus the purpose of this roundtable is to bring five scholars together: Donna Drucker (on the intellectual relationship between Dickinson and Kinsey), Anne Garner (Dickinson’s role as an agitator within medical libraries for greater public access to sexual information), Rose Holz (the 1939 Dickinson-Belskie Birth Series sculptures), Wendy Kline (Dickinson as a sexual predator who violated some of his patients), and Beans Velocci (Dickinson’s construction of Norma, the perfectly vulvaless woman). Led by moderator Sarah Rodriguez, each will briefly share their engagement with Dickinson. The conversation will then open up in exploration of Dickinson in ways that prompts a critical discussion of his life and legacy while still seeing the scope and influence of his work. Keywords: 1. Reproductive Medicine 2. Sexology 3. Medical Ethics 4. Obstetrics and Gynecology 5. Birth control

1. To understand the contributions of Dr. Robert L. Dickinson as physician, scientist, and artist to the developing fields of sexology and reproductive healthcare in the first half of the twentieth century.
2. To evaluate the legacy of his work through the prisms of medical ethics, structural racism, and cissexism.
3. To consider the ways that Dickinson shaped the role of a public physician in the US beyond the clinic, via research advocacy, public education, and the arts.