Dr. Helen Octavia Dickens Information

1(BBC). The daughter of a former slave, Helen Octavia Dickens empowered teen mothers and pioneered the popularity of the Pap smear, helping to save hundreds of lives.

In 1951, a 31-year-old mother-of-five walked into Maryland’s Johns Hopkins Hospital for what she called “a knot on my womb”. The knot, it turned out, was a virulent cancer that had started in her cervix. She would soon die in agony of the disease, then the number one killer of American women.

The woman was Henrietta Lacks, who would one day become known for her unintended contribution to medical science. After her death, scientists would take her cancer cells and reproduce them into perpetuity without her family’s knowledge, using them to investigate diseases from Aids to polio.

If Lacks had been given a Pap smear, she may have survived. Developed a decade earlier, the simple screening tool – named after its creator, Greek gynaecologist George “Pap” Papanicolaou – was the newest and most promising technology in early cancer detection. It rose to become the gold standard in cancer screening, and would be instrumental in slashing cervical cancer rates by 70% over the next half century.

But its benefits were not applied equally. In the 1950s United States, the face of cancer prevention campaigns was a well-to-do white woman; reproductive cancer in black women was all but invisible. (Even when the magazine Colliers told the story of Lacks, whom they called “Mrs L”, they pointedly left out her race.) Far fewer black women got the test, either because their doctor never offered it or because they didn’t know to ask.

2. (Jevs)

Helping Mothers in Philadelphia

Dr. Dickens was born in 1909. Her mother was a domestic servant, and her father had been a slave. Dr. Dickens was an excellent student, and her desire to help improve the lives of others led her to enroll in medical school at the University of Illinois. She graduated in 1933, the only black woman in her class. She worked for a time in Chicago and developed a special interest in Obstetrics and Gynecology, the branch of medicine that is devoted to the care of pregnant women. In 1935, she moved to Philadelphia to work in a clinic that served one of the city’s low-income black communities.

Learning and Leading

Dr. Dickens wanted to continue her education, so she enrolled in a master’s degree program at The University of Pennsylvania (Penn) School of Medicine. After graduating, she took on leadership roles in the Obstetrics and Gynecology departments at two Philadelphia hospitals. In 1965, she began teaching at Penn. Dr. Dickens was dedicated, talented, and driven to change medicine for the better, and her career included several “firsts.” She was the first black woman to become a full professor at Penn and the first black female physician in Philadelphia who became board-certified in Obstetrics & Gynecology. She was also the first black woman admitted to the American College of Surgeons. That meant her fellow physicians viewed her as one of the leading doctors in the country.

3(University of Penn).

Helen Octavia Dickens was born in Dayton, Ohio, to Charles and Daisy (Green) Dickens on February 21, 1909. After graduating from Roosevelt High School, she attended Crane Junior College in Chicago, Illinois. She was a 1934 graduate of the University of Illinois School of Medicine, the only African-American woman in her graduating class. She spent two years after graduation at Provident Hospital in Chicago, and then practiced with Dr. Virginia Alexander in a birthing-home practice in North Philadelphia.

After seven years with Dr. Alexander, she sought further training in obstetrics and gynecology, spending a year at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Medicine. Dickens passed the board examinations in 1945, becoming the first female African-American board-certified Ob/gyn in Philadelphia. That year, Dr. Dickens became Director of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Mercy Douglass Hospital in Philadelphia. In 1951, Dr. Dickens joined the courtesy staff of Women’s Hospital and would later be named chief of obstetrics and gynecology. When the University of Pennsylvania took over the Women’s Hospital in 1956, Dr. Dickens became a member of the staff and faculty in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology of the School of Medicine, becoming the first black woman to serve in this position. In addition to her medical practice, she was professor of obstetrics and gynecology.

One of her special interests was aiding pregnant teenagers. In 1967, Dickens founded the Teen Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania for school-age mothers in the inner city. The clinic’s services included counseling and group therapy, educational classes, family planning assistance, and prenatal care. Another of Dickens’s interests was cancer education and services. She initiated a project that brought temporary cancer detection facilities into Philadelphia’s inner city. Dr. Dickens also implemented a project funded by the National Institute for Health that encouraged doctors to perform Pap smears to test for cervical cancer.