Grantly Dick-Read

Who was Grantly Dick-Read?

Grantly Dick-Read was a British obstetrician and a leading advocate of natural childbirth.

Grantly Dick-Read was born in Suffolk on 26 January 1890, the son of a Norfolk miller and the sixth of seven children. Educated at Cambridge he was an excellent athlete and horseman.

He received his medical training at the London Hospital, Whitechapel, where he qualified in 1914. During World War I he was badly wounded at Gallipoli but later served in France as a medical officer.

In the early 1920s he worked at a clinic in Woking and it became very popular. Dick-Read specialised in childbirth and care, observing and writing up case histories and notes.

He published his first book ’Natural Childbirth’ in 1933. Dick-Read's ideas were at first ridiculed, and he was expelled from the London clinic he had set up with a group of fellow obstetricians. When the Woking partnership was dissolved in 1934, Dick-Read set up a private clinic at 25 Harley Street.

His second book, Revelation of Childbirth was published in 1942, and aimed at a general readership. It became an international bestseller, and it is still in print. Dick-Read was invited to give lecture tours all over the world.