Deborah A. Driscoll, MD, with Elizabeth A. Howell, MD, MPP, chair of Obstetrics and Gynecology, at the dedication of the expanded display honoring Helen O. Dickens, MD. Dickens’ values echo still today at Penn Medicine, where a new systemwide effort aims to closely measure and improve Black maternal health.
Nearly 20 years after a small sapling was planted on the 36th Street walkway south of Spruce Street, Jayne Henderson Brown, MD, still remembered the spot; she led us directly to the now 40-foot-tall maple on a campus visit this fall. It had been planted in honor of her mother, Helen Octavia Dickens, MD, a few months after she died.
Like the tree, with time and light, Dickens’ already formidable legacy as a prominent African-American woman obstetrician-gynecologist, and the first on Penn’s faculty, has grown in stature.
Dickens received widespread acclaim in life for her work as a champion for health equity for Black women – campaigning to prevent cancer through Pap smears and more. Her work as an associate dean to recruit more medical students of color helped improve diversity in the field at a time when she had vanishingly few colleagues who looked like her.
Many of the thousands of the medical students, trainees, and younger physicians who worked alongside Dickens or who she helped recruit, as well as her own family members who followed in her footsteps to become physicians, now continue to sustain and extend her commitment to health equity and diversity in medicine. They are her living legacy who extend her impact into the present day.
Today, Dickens’ story has been prominently amplified. An expanded biographical exhibit about her life and career, explained in detail by its curator in this issue, is now on display surrounding her portrait at a prominent location in Stemmler Hall, which is today home to state-of-the-art research laboratories including many core services and anatomy laboratories for medical student instruction, and the corridor where the exhibit is placed is a connective hub between the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and adjacent research buildings.
Telling Dickens’ story in this way is crucial to expand upon her living legacies for several reasons. Undoubtedly, as a Black woman, racism and misogyny dampened the recognition Dickens received in her lifetime relative to the caliber of her achievements. And those who knew her describe her as down-to-earth; she simply quietly went about her work.
So it was that Deborah Driscoll, MD, recalled at the dedication event for the new exhibit, that despite training under Dickens when she came to Penn in the 1970s as an intern, she had little idea of her achievements until decades later because she was so humble. It was only about 10 years ago that Driscoll, then the chair of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Perelman School of Medicine, now senior vice president for the Clinical Practices of the University of Pennsylvania, sought to learn more about Dickens and was astonished at the depth and import of the material in the five large file boxes the University Archives staff brought out for her perusal. She had known Dickens’ name, her personality, and her clinical skill and compassion, but hadn’t known her story.
Legacies – whether they take the form of living descendants and mentees or inspiration from a story – are a powerful force for change in the face of ingrained challenges and injustices.
Dickens is an important example but not the only one. This issue’s cover story comprises a collection of first-person essays on the devastating impact of, and potential solutions to, community gun violence. As noted in the section’s introduction, about a quarter century ago, there was little academic attention directed to gun violence as a public health issue. The injury science center then created at Penn was aptly described as a “Mom and Pop shop” by one of its pair of co-founders. From the beginning, though, they set a goal to grow a larger ecosystem of scholars. They recruited and mentored outside their own disciplines by design, and despite limited opportunities for funding, a much wider and more diverse cohort of experts today is living out the legacy of their mentors’ earlier vision. At a time when Philadelphia is reeling from the deadliest year on record with an unprecedented rate of gun violence, they are branching out with new solutions, from social interventions to help patients after the trauma of a gunshot wound, to home repairs in disadvantaged and disinvested neighborhoods.
Generations of physicians and scholars build on one another’s work through inspiration and deliberate learning. The story of Dickens’ life and career achievements is one that can, should, and, increasingly will, inspire current and future physicians and scholars. Without knowing her, they can still know her story, and live the legacy she cultivated.