Bmore Scientific

Posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 11:16 am

Today is International Women’s Day, where women are celebrated globally for their economic, social, political, and scientific achievements. This post is in continuation of my own celebration of National Women’s History Month.
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Florence Rena Sabin’s life was full of firsts. In 1896, after saving up money for 3 years as a schoolteacher, Florence Rena Sabin enrolled in Johns Hopkins Medical School. From a mining town in Colorado, Sabin was the first woman to graduate with an M.D. from Johns Hopkins. After graduation, she joined the Department of Anatomy with the support of a fellowship from the Baltimore Association for the Promotion of University Education of Women. She was the first woman faculty member at Johns Hopkins, the first woman to hold the rank of full professor, the first woman president of the American Association of Anatomists, the first woman elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences, and the first woman to be appointed a full member at the Rockefeller Institute. In her obituary in the British Medical Journal, she was referred to as “the greatest living woman scientist and one of the foremost scientists of all time”.

Her research contributed more than a hundred papers to the literature on the lymphatic system, tuberculosis, blood vessels, cells, and connective tissue. Contrary to popular belief at the time, Sabin demonstrated that the lymphatic system structure was formed from an embryo’s veins rather than from other tissues. Among her other research, she perfected a cell staining technique use to visualize live cells. As a scientist at the Rockefeller Institute, she made major contributions to the understanding of the human immune response to tuberculosis.

Upon accepting the Pictorial Review achievement award in 1929, Sabin said:

I hope my studies may be an encouragement to other women, especially to young women, to devote their lives to the larger interests of the mind. It matters little whether men or women have the more brains; all we women need to do to exert our proper influence is just to use all the brains we have.

Rest assured, Dr. Sabin, you are an encouragement.

See the National Library of Medicine for a more detailed biography of Sabin.