"[5] A mixed review by the American Journal of Psychology wrote Dickerson "has the fatal error of the pedagogue that the number of topics and range must be sacrificed to thoroughness of method.

It would seem that the 'ten years of observation and study' to which the author confesses should have furnished more accurate data on such fundamental points as breeding seasons, number of eggs laid, quantity and kinds of food, etc.

"[9] From 1907 to 1908 she was an instructor at Stanford University, where she co-authored three papers with ichthyologist David Starr Jordan, including the description of a new species of halfbeak.

[12] In July 1909, a Department of Ichthyology and Herpetology was formally established by the Museum, with Dickerson as the sole herpetologist alongside ichthyologists Bashford Dean, John Treadwell Nichols, and Louis Hussakof.

[1] She conducted some field work in Arizona and Massachusetts in 1912, before turning her attention to the development of the Herpetology Department into a leading research and exhibition group.

[13][14] She attracted a trio of notable herpetologists to the American Museum: Karl Patterson Schmidt, Gladwyn Kingsley Noble, and Charles Lewis Camp.

Despite other truly heavy responsibilities, she had built a functioning department from scratch, emphasizing collection growth and literature facilities in order to support the twin functions of exhibition and research in herpetology.By around 1919, Dickerson was showing signs of mental disturbance, attributed to the stress of holding dual curatorial and editorial duties.

Her behavior became erratic, and she experienced auditory hallucinations of the Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, an associate of the Museum, to whom she wrote several letters indicative of mental disturbance.

On December 24, she was committed to a psychiatric institution on Wards Island, where she spent the rest of her life, dying at the age of 57 on April 8, 1923.