As part of our blog series about women medical pioneers, meet Dr Florence Sabin, a doctor, scientist and public health campaigner.
Florence was an exceptional woman of her time who received many awards for her contributions to medical science. One of the most significant of which was her 13-year study of the pathology of Tuberculosis. Read on to find out more!
A Prolific Career
Born in Central City, Colorado, in 1871, Dr Florence Sabin attended the all-women Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She gained a degree in zoology before enrolling with a group of 14 women at the newly established John Hopkins Medical School.
Florence excelled at anatomy and produced a textbook on the structure of the brain early in her career. As a young intern, she also advanced scientific knowledge of the function of lymphatic vessels.
By 1917, she was awarded the first ever professorship offered to a woman at Hopkins. In 1924, she became the first woman president of the American Association of Anatomists. In 1925, she became the first woman to be appointed a full member of the Rockefeller institute. She produced over 100 scientific papers during her career.
The White Plague
Tuberculosis, historically known as “the white plague,” “consumption’” and “the captain of all these men of death” is one of the deadliest diseases in human history:
- By 1900, it is estimated that TB had killed 1 in 7 people who had ever lived.
- Prior to Covid-19, TB was the leading infectious killer.
- In 2020, ten million people contracted tuberculosis worldwide and 1.5 million died from it (214,000 of these people had HIV).
In the early 1900s, Tuberculosis was the second leading cause of death in America, infecting 80-90% of urban dwellers. The high immigration rates, filthy tenements, and crowded workplaces provided a bountiful reservoir and ideal conditions for transmission. Patients often suffered a prolonged illness as the disease gradually destroyed their lungs and wasted their bodies.
Dr Adelaide Dutcher, a fellow female physician from Hopkins medical school, was conducting follow-up visits for patients who had been hospitalised with TB at that time. Following a home visit in December 1900, she wrote:
“Their poverty in many instances is extreme. Perhaps on this account there appears to be among them a greater neglect of the sick. One man was found to have been confined to his bed for several weeks with almost no care whatever. His father came in daily to bring him a few scraps of food. The poor fellow was spitting at random over everything within reach. His bed and the walls and floor besmeared with sputum.”
Other excerpts of her paper describe the occupations of those she visited with TB:
“The sweatshops have a goodly representation among these individuals. Not a few of these patients have to do with the handling of food which might easily become contaminated by contact with their soiled fingers. In our list, we find cooks, bakers, cracker packers and keepers of little milk and meat shops represented”.
Public Health Champion
Whilst at the Rockefeller Institute, New York, Florence Sabin led a team of researchers studying tuberculosis. She dedicated 13 years to understanding this disease and progressing the scientific community’s knowledge of the immune response to mycobacterium tuberculosis bacilli.
In her later career, she moved to Denver where she launched a campaign to improve sanitation in the city and introduced regulation of restaurants and food suppliers. She also advocated screening for TB and syphilis at a population level.
Within 2 years of her move, Denver’s TB incidence was reduced from 54.7 to 27 per 100,000 and syphilis from 700- to 60 per 100.000.
In her acceptance speech for the Pictorial Review achievement award in 1929, Florence 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.”
Ending the TB epidemic by 2030 is among the health targets of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
