Sabin, Florence (1871–1953)

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Sabin, Florence (1871–1953)

American physician and medical researcher who made substantial contributions to the fields of histology, immunology, and public health and fought for women's rights within and outside her profession. Pronunciation: SAY-bin. Born Florence Rena Sabin on November 9, 1871, in Central City, Colorado; died on October 3, 1953, in Denver; daughter of George Kimball Sabin (a mining engineer) and Serena (Miner) Sabin; graduated from Vermont Academy, 1889; Smith College, B.S., 1893; Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, M.D., 1900; never married; no children.

Awards:

Baltimore Association for the Advancement of University Education for Women fellowship (1901); Naples Table Association Prize (1903); numerous honorary degrees, including a Doctorate of Science from Smith College (1910); appointed first woman full member of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (1925); elected first woman member of the National Academy of Sciences (1925); Annual Achievement Award, Pictorial Review (1929); National Achievement Award, Chi Omega Sorority (1932); M. Carey Thomas Prize, Bryn Mawr College (1935); Trudeau Medal, National Tuberculosis Association (1945); Jane Addams Medal for distinguished service by an American woman (1947); Medal for Achievement, University of Colorado (1947); American Woman's Association Medal for eminent achievement (1948); Lasker Award, American Public Health Association (1951); Distinguished Service Award, University of Colorado (1953); Elizabeth Blackwell Citation of the New York Infirmary (1953).

Was instructor in zoology, Smith College (1895–96); interned at Johns Hopkins Hospital (1900–01); was a fellow under Franklin Paine Mall, Department of Anatomy, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (1901–02); as instructor, Department of Anatomy, was the first woman on the Johns Hopkins medical faculty (1902–05); was an associate professor (1905–17); was the first woman promoted to full professorship at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, becoming a professor of histology in the Department of Anatomy (1917–25); was the first woman president of the American Association of Anatomists (1924–26); was a member of the Research Committee of the National Tuberculosis Committee (1926); was a member of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (1925–38); served on advisory board, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1939–47); served on the board of directors and was vice-president for three years of the Children's Hospital, Denver (1942–46); served as chair, Sabin Committee, Governor of Colorado Post-War Planning Committee(1944); was manager, Denver Department of Health and Welfare (1947–51); served as president, Western Branch of the American Public Health Association (1948); served as chair, Board of Health and Hospitals, Denver (1951). Book-length publications: Atlas of the Medulla and Midbrain (Friedenwald Co., 1901); Franklin Paine Mall: The Story of a Mind (Johns Hopkins Press, 1934).

During the late 19th century, women found it difficult to obtain a high-quality medical education. Many medical schools refused to admit them entirely, believing that women lacked the intellectual capacity, scientific objectivity, and physical stamina necessary to practice medicine. Although there were several all-female medical colleges in the United States, the quality of education available at these institutions, and at most medical schools in the country for that matter, paled in comparison to what was available at the renowned medical colleges of Europe.

In the early 1890s, a group of physicians and scientists affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University began plans for a medical school that would equal and perhaps even surpass the great European institutions of medical education. This grandiose scheme required a large amount of money, however, and in 1890 the trustees of Johns Hopkins began a fund drive to raise capital for the new institution. Soon after, a group of women headed by M. Carey Thomas , dean and future president of Bryn Mawr College, and Mary E. Garrett , heiress to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad fortune, founded the Baltimore Women's Committee to help gather money for the project. Garrett offered to contribute $60,000 to the university, provided (1) baccalaureate degrees were required for admission, which was unusual at the time; and (2) women were admitted and educated on the same (as opposed to equal but separate) basis as men.

Although the trustees agreed that the requirements for admission would raise the standards and status of the medical college, they were vehemently opposed to Garrett's request to admit women. Like many male physicians and scientists of the period, the trustees believed that the presence of women in medicine degraded the status of the profession as a whole, and that women as a class were incapable of being good physicians and medical scientists. They therefore felt that admitting women would defeat the purpose of creating a prestigious, high-quality institution of medical education. It was only when the fund-raising campaign faltered in 1893, and Garrett raised her contribution to $300,000, that the trustees grudgingly agreed to accept Garrett's conditions. Among the early graduates of this outstanding new medical school was Florence Sabin, who would become the preeminent woman scientist of her generation.

Born in 1871 in a humble frame house in Central City, a mining town near Denver, Colorado, Sabin had little inkling of her future accomplishments and fame as a scientist. Her early life was primitive despite her father's income as a mining engineer: the family home was poorly constructed and had no plumbing, electricity, or heat. Her childhood was also disrupted by a series of deaths within her immediate family, the most unsettling of which was the loss of her mother on Florence's seventh birthday. Florence and her older sister, Mary Sabin , were then shuttled between relatives and boarding schools in Denver, Chicago, and Vermont.

According to Mary, Florence's bent toward medicine was foreshadowed in her early days in Central City, when, in May 1874, a devastating fire destroyed much of the town center. Florence's father George Sabin had gone to help fight the fire and returned with singed whiskers and a blackened hand and face. Watching her younger sister tenderly clean her father's wounds, Mary predicted that Florence would someday enter the healing profession. There were also physicians in Sabin's family tree; her grandfather had been a country doctor in Vermont, and her father had studied medicine for a few years before deciding mining was more profitable. As well, the loss of her mother at such a young age may have influenced her eventual career choice.

At Smith College, where she received her undergraduate education, Sabin's interest in medicine was nurtured by Dr. Grace Preston , who was the college physician and an instructor in physical education and hygiene. Preston warned Sabin that becoming a physician would be difficult: "Being a woman doctor is pioneering even now," she told Florence, but added that "you have pioneer blood in you," referring to Sabin's roots on the Western frontier. Preston told her about the work of the Baltimore Women's Committee to open Johns Hopkins Medical School to women, and encouraged the young woman to try to gain admittance to the first medical school class. Preston inspired Sabin, and she agreed that her "pioneer spirit" gave her the backbone to fight for her and other women's right to study medicine.

Unfortunately, her father's health was failing and his business had fallen on hard times, and

Florence was forced to find the funds for medical school on her own. To raise money, she taught mathematics for several years at Wolfe Hall in Denver, which she had attended while she was a young girl, and then spent a year teaching zoology at Smith College. Finally, in 1896, Sabin had earned enough to afford the expensive tuition at Johns Hopkins Medical School.

Sabin's attendance at Johns Hopkins was fortunate, because the employment situation for women in medicine was extremely bleak during her lifetime. Women who overcame discrimination in admissions policies and managed to receive a medical diploma nonetheless had difficulty finding jobs in the field and were excluded from internships and residencies at most hospitals in the United States. The high-quality education available at Hopkins compared to other medical schools at the time, and the connections she made with prominent male scientists at that institution, undoubtedly gave Sabin an edge when it came to finding employment. While at Hopkins, she came under the influence of Franklin P. Mall, a professor of anatomy and perhaps the leading scientist at Johns Hopkins, who would have a marked influence on her education and future career. As a student under Mall's direction, Sabin worked on developing a three-dimensional model of the brainstem of newborn infants and made a major contribution to the understanding of the structure of the human brain. Published in 1901 as An Atlas of the Medulla and Midbrain, the model became a popular anatomical text of the day. In addition to her substantial accomplishments in medical research, Sabin was also an outstanding medical student and graduated third in her class in 1900.

Yet even Sabin's stellar credentials were not enough to assure her the same recognition and rewards as male scientists. After graduation, she encountered some resistance to her request for an internship at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. There were only 12 openings available to the graduating class, 4 of which were highly prized positions with Dr. William Osler in internal medicine. Since the top student in Sabin's class was too unhealthy to pursue an internship and the second student chose surgery, there should have been no obstacles to Sabin's appointment as an intern in internal medicine. The male faculty were somewhat reluctant to appoint women to these positions, however, partly because they believed male students were more deserving. In addition, these positions were considered unsuitable for women because they entailed contact with male patients in the "colored" wards of the hospital. Although the faculty eventually relented and allowed Sabin and another woman classmate to become internal medicine interns, many of their male classmates protested that these female students had "robbed" them of their rightful positions. The hospital superintendent shared a similar mistrust of women physicians, and even accused Sabin and the other female intern of having "abnormal sex interests" because of their willingness to work in a black male ward.

Although the Hopkins trustees resigned themselves to the presence of women as medical students and interns, they continued to bar women from faculty positions, regardless of their qualifications. Fortunately, Sabin's work had caught the attention of the same group of Baltimore women who had been responsible for opening the medical school to female students. After gaining Mall's approval, the Baltimore Women's Committee set up a fellowship for Sabin in the Department of Anatomy under Mall's supervision. During her tenure as a fellow, Sabin began research on the development and structure of the lymphatic system, work that would occupy her for a number of years. When her fellowship expired in 1902, Mall kept her on as an assistant instructor in the Department of Anatomy, which made her the first woman on the Johns Hopkins faculty. Despite this recognition from her mentor and her educational qualifications, her male colleagues continued to call her "Miss," rather than "Doctor," Sabin.

Rather than publicly protest this unequal treatment by her male colleagues, Sabin quietly dedicated herself to her research and teaching, with the hope that if she worked hard and avoided controversy, she would eventually receive the praise she deserved. Between 1902 and 1925, she focused on studying the origins of blood cells and the lymphatic system. One of her most significant accomplishments in this area was her demonstration that the lymphatic system arises from buds on the blood vessels, disproving an older theory that the lymphatics arose from the tissue spaces and then grew toward the blood vessels.

At first, acknowledgment of Sabin's scientific accomplishments came largely from other women. For example, in 1903 one of her papers on the lymphatic system was awarded a $1,000 prize from the Naples Table Association, an organization dedicated to promoting scientific research by women. In 1910, Smith College awarded her an honorary Doctorate of Science in recognition of her outstanding scientific accomplishments. She received numerous other awards from women's organizations throughout her life, including the Annual Achievement Award from Pictorial Review in 1929, the National Achievement Award from Chi Omega Sorority in 1932, and the M. Carey Thomas Prize in 1935.

Sabin also gradually won some measure of respect from male scientists, although it was half-hearted at times. In 1917, she was promoted to full professor in the Department of Anatomy at Hopkins, the first woman to attain this goal. However, her male colleagues never fully accepted her as an equal, as is demonstrated by their failure to appoint her as chair of the department following Mall's death in 1917. Instead, Sabin endured the humiliation of watching one of her own students, whom many of her friends considered her inferior in experience and talent, promoted above her to chair. Although Sabin was disappointed, she made no formal complaints about this episode to the Johns Hopkins administration.

While she never outwardly protested unfair treatment from men, Sabin did support some feminist causes. Throughout her career, she maintained close contact with the members of the Baltimore Women's Committee, who, in addition to supporting Sabin and other women's scientific careers, fought diligently for women's suffrage and other feminist issues. Sabin herself wrote countless letters to Maryland legislators, marched in suffrage parades, and worked tirelessly to convince her male colleagues of the importance of the suffrage issue. In 1909, she happily pointed out that all the full professors at the medical school, with the interesting exception of the professor of obstetrics, supported women's suffrage.

Sabin was aware that other women scientists tended to be underrecognized, and she worked quietly behind the scenes to improve some conditions for female colleagues. For example, when she was notified that she had been selected for an award from a particular organization, she would frequently turn the award down and suggest that one of her younger, less recognized colleagues should be honored instead. Similarly, when she served on the advisory board of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, she ensured that women received equal consideration for these awards. She warned younger women scientists that professional success would not come easily, despite the efforts of herself and other established female scientists to improve the situation for women in science. Indeed, she advised female students considering scientific careers to "be prepared to work hard for work's sake, without thought of what it may bring them in the way of personal acclaim and emolument."

By adhering to her own standards of hard work and humility, Sabin achieved a level of scientific renown that no woman had before. In 1924, she was elected the first female president of the American Association of Anatomists. The following year, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the first woman ever to receive such a highly coveted position. Also in 1925, she left the Johns Hopkins Medical School to accept a position as a member of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, again the first woman to be so honored. At the Rockefeller Institute, she spent 13 years working on various projects on the immune system, including a groundbreaking study on the immune response to tuberculosis. Her work at the Institute won her widespread acclaim from female and male scientists alike.

After leaving the Rockefeller Institute in 1938, Sabin retired to her home state of Colorado to spend more time with her sister Mary, who by this time was her only surviving relative. Sabin sustained an active intellectual life even in retirement, and maintained close contact with her friends and former colleagues in Baltimore and New York. She did not remain in retirement long, for in 1944 she accepted a request from Governor John Vivant of Colorado to serve on his Post-War Planning Committee and assist in the state's health needs. Sabin soon discovered that Colorado's public-health system was riddled with political corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency, and she essentially began a one-woman campaign for reforms. With the same zeal she had devoted to the suffrage campaign, Sabin collected information on the state's health institutions, and lobbied legislators and officials to support and more adequately finance public-health programs. Her hard work resulted in the passage of a series of public-health bills, commonly referred to as the "Sabin laws," which significantly improved the amount of funding allotted to various regulatory agencies. These laws also substantially improved the health and welfare of the citizens of Colorado, particularly those who suffered from tuberculosis. Within two years after passage of the Sabin laws, the death rate from tuberculosis in the state was cut in half. Despite her advanced age, Sabin continued to work on behalf of public and environmental health issues in Colorado throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1947, her achievements in public health were recognized by her election as president of both the Western Branch of the American Public Health Association and the Denver Board of Public Health, as well as her unanimous appointment as honorary fellow of the American Public Health Association.

It was only when her sister became increasingly ill during 1951 that Sabin finally withdrew from all professional activities. Eventually, the strain of caring for her invalid sister wore Florence down, and her own health gradually declined throughout 1953. That October, Sabin died of a heart attack, just a few days shy of her 82nd birthday. In her obituary in the Denver Post, she was called the "First Lady of American Science," a tribute demonstrated by the numerous awards and honorary degrees she received throughout her life and the buildings named for her at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and at Smith College. In 1956, recognition of her life's accomplishments culminated in the installation of a bronze statue in the National Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C., in honor of "Florence Sabin, Teacher-Scientist-Citizen."

sources:

Andriole, Vincent T. "Florence Rena Sabin—Teacher, Scientist, Citizen," in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. Vol. 14. July 1959, pp. 320–350.

Bluemel, Elinor. Florence Sabin: Colorado Woman of the Century. Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press, 1959.

Brieger, Gert H. "Florence Rena Sabin," in Notable American Women: The Modern Period. Eds. Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Kubie, Lawrence S. "Florence Rena Sabin," in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. Vol. 4. Spring 1961, pp. 306–315.

McMaster, Philip D. and Michael Heidelberger. "Florence Rena Sabin," in Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences. Vol. 34, 1960, pp. 271–319.

Phelan, Mary K. Probing the Unknown: The Story of Dr. Florence Sabin. NY: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969.