Clarence Gamble - Biography

Biography

Dr. Clarence J. Gamble was elected president by the board of directors of the newly incorporated Pathfinder Fund on February 27, 1957. But the work of The Pathfinder Fund to make birth control available began some 28 years earlier, in 1929, when Clarence Gamble gave $5,000 to open a maternal health clinic in Cincinnati, Ohio.His work is carried on by Terry Gamble Boyer of San Francisco and Harbor Point, Michigan.

In the face of intense hostility from both the general public and organized medicine, Clarence Gamble, along with Margaret Sanger and Robert Latou Dickinson, spearheaded the movement to gain acceptance for birth control in the United States. Believing that every child should be a wanted child, Dr. Gamble was the quintessential pathfinder, cutting through the underbrush of entrenched convention with innovative solutions born of common sense. He put his energy, persistence, and a substantial part of his wealth behind his conviction that birth control should be available globally.

In January 1914, on his twenty-first birthday, Clarence James Gamble received his first million dollars. As the grandson of James Gamble, co-founder of Procter & Gamble, Clarence was an heir to the family money, which came with a stipulation: at least 10 percent was to be devoted to charitable giving. He later increased this 10 percent to 30 and more. He felt an obligation and responsibility. The pursuit of this vision became the driving force in his life.

After graduating from Princeton University in 1914 and Harvard Medical School in 1920, Clarence began his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1923 Clarence’s interest in medical research led him to secure an apprenticeship with Alfred Newton Richards, director of the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania. However, Clarence’s plans to begin working with Richards were interrupted by the death of his father, David Berry Gamble.

On June 21, 1924, at the age of 30, Clarence married Sarah Merry Bradley. In Sarah, Clarence found the perfect helpmate and ideal companion. Together they were a team, allowing Clarence to make invaluable contributions to the worldwide birth control movement. In October 1925, three weeks before the birth of the first of their five children, Clarence introduced himself to Dr. Robert Latou Dickinson, who in 1923 had established the National Committee on Maternal Health. Clarence wrote his mother about their first conversation, when Dickinson said that birth control is socially much needed, and that “young men like you ought to take up the work.” Dickinson asked Clarence, “Don’t you want to help me and keep on with the work when I am through?” Certainly Dickinson’s question smacked of prophecy, for in 1929, a number of events converged to send Clarence decisively on the path to helping Dickinson in service of what Clarence would always call the “Great Cause.”

In January 1929, Clarence’s mother, Mary, died. Clarence wanted to create a memorial for his mother in Cincinnati. In a discussion with her gynecologist, the highly respected Elizabeth Campbell, he learned that his mother had wanted a maternal health clinic in Cincinnati. Dr. Campbell may have related to Clarence the case of a woman who had been pregnant 22 times in 21 years and had 14 surviving children. Clarence became a member of Dickinson’s Committee on Maternal Health and through it made his first “pathfinder” grant. With that $5,000, Dr. Campbell opened the Cincinnati Maternal Health Clinic in November 1929 and began dispensing information on birth control to Cincinnati women. At that time, few other birth control clinics existed, other than one in Cleveland, one in Chicago, and Margaret Sanger’s Clinical Research Bureau in New York.

At about this same time, Gamble’s college friend from Princeton, Stuart Mudd, had become professor of microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania. His wife, Emily, would pioneer the field of marriage counseling. Together they had formed the Southeastern Pennsylvania Birth Control League, and opened a birth control clinic at in Philadelphia.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the only acceptable contraceptive was the diaphragm. The diaphragm was used with spermicidal jelly, and the League needed to determine which contraceptive jellies, among the many advertised, were effective. Clarence, ready at hand with a lab at the University of Pennsylvania, did some very practical research, and soon he and Sarah were actively supporting the League and the clinic with both his research and funding. By 1930, Clarence was chairman of the board of the Philadelphia Maternal Health Centers. In this new capacity, Clarence learned of the innumerable families in Philadelphia whose children were neither planned nor wanted. He was soon convinced that there must be a simple method of contraception, one that did not require a costly doctor’s visit as did fitting of the diaphragm, and that was inexpensive and immediately available.