An illustrated lecture with Kevin Dann
Date: Tuesday, March 29th
Time: 8 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by the Hollow Earth Society

The Brooklyn-born pioneering gynecologist, sexologist, and medical illustrator Dr. Robert Latou Dickinson (1861 – 1950) was a consummate sensualist who knew well the physical ache that could be inspired by a beautifully lit and framed landscape, its harmonic dimensions entering into his very bones. His detailed pen & ink sketches of the Hudson Highlands and other New York metropolitan natural areas graced the New York Walk Book, as well as the margins of hundreds of letters exchanged with friends. In these drawings Dickinson captured the “return to the Pleistocene” landscape ideal that shaped the Harriman Park and other early 20th century Arcadian refuges.

Dickinson brought that same eye for detail to the human body. Collecting over 5600 sexual histories from patients, he made photographs and sketches that informed his diagnoses, treatments, and patient education. These “fleshscapes” also built up Dickinson’s image of the ideal human body, expressed through the then-prominent language of eugenics, and spectacularly displayed in works like Human Sex Anatomy: A Topographical Hand Atlas (1949) and his Birth Series models for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. In this evening’s illustrated talk, we’ll explore the convergence of aesthetic, social, and hygienic ideals in Dr. Dickinson’s art and science.

Historian, naturalist, and troubadour Dr. Kevin Dann is the author of ten books, including Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge; Across the Great Border Fault: The Naturalist Myth in America; and Lewis Creek Lost and Found. He has taught at Rutgers University, University of Vermont, and SUNY. In the spring of 2009, he walked from Montreal to Manhattan to commemorate the 400th anniversaries of Hudson’s and Champlain’s voyages, and, having crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, decided to stay here.