The female physician who popularised the Pap smear - BBC Future

The female physician who popularised the Pap smear - BBC Future

Philadelphia’s Pap smear physician

Gynaecologist Helen Octavia Dickens would drive around Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in an American Cancer Society van, giving Black women free Pap smears. From the 1950s onwards, she worked to make the simple tests more accessible to Black women, amid a deep and well-founded distrust of the US medical system among that group. Thanks in part to her, deaths from cervical cancer among the city's Black women fell by two-thirds within two decades. She saw her work as a form of racial progress, helping to address the inadequate health care available to Black communities in America.

BBC Future | 15 min read