Gordon Thomas Dickinson

From general practitioner to journalist to stockbroker to psychiatrist to psychoanalyst: such was the curiously meandering career of Gordon Dickinson, sometime editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ). These abrupt changes of direction inevitably had an impact on his family. “Over the time I was married to him,” his ex-wife Mary Lou reflects, “I felt like I’d been married to five different people.” His daughter, Andrea Dickinson, says, “He did tell me that he liked the opportunity to do different things. Nowadays it’s not unusual for people to have a number of careers over the course of their life, but in those days it was less common to go to a different discipline for a while.” Mary Lou Dickinson accepts the suggestion that her husband seems to have spent much of his working life finding out what he wanted to do. “But also making a contribution on the way,” she insists.

Dickinson was born to parents who had emigrated from England. …