Florence R. Sabin

American anatomist

• Born: November 9, 1871; Central City, Colorado
• Died: October 3, 1953; Denver, Colorado

Eminent anatomist Florence R. Sabin did important research into brain development and the lymphatic system. She also worked in immunology, especially focusing on tuberculosis. She was the first woman to graduate from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, as well as the school’s first female faculty member and first female full professor.

Primary field: Biology

Specialty: Anatomy

Early Life

Florence Rena Sabin was born in Central City, Colorado, on November 9, 1871. She was the second daughter of mining engineer George Kimball Sabin and schoolteacher Serena Miner. Her paternal grandfather was a doctor. Sabin and her family moved to Denver when she was four. When she was seven, her mother died of puerperal fever. She and her sister, Mary, attended Wolfe Hall, an Episcopalian boarding school in Denver, for a year before moving to Chicago. Once in Chicago, the family lived with George’s brother Albert Sabin.

In Illinois, Sabin and her sister attended a private school for two years, spending their summer vacations with their paternal grandparents in Saxtons River, Vermont. The sisters attended the Vermont Academy boarding school. Although Sabin had planned to be a pianist, she had always been strong in math and science, and she decided while in high school to focus on academics instead. Upon graduation, she and her sister were expected to attend college, and both went to Smith College in Massachusetts.

At Smith College, Sabin majored in zoology. During her junior year, she developed a strong interest in the study of biology. After receiving her bachelor of science from Smith College in 1893, she taught high school math at Wolfe Hall for two years to earn the money for her first year of medical school at Johns Hopkins. After teaching at Wolfe Hall, she became an assistant in the Smith College biology department. The summer before entering Johns Hopkins, she worked at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Life’s Work

In 1896, Florence Sabin entered Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. The medical school had just started accepting female students, and as part of the third coed class of medical students, Sabin was one of fourteen women in her class of forty-five. It was not long before her aptitude caught the attention of anatomist Franklin P. Mall, a prominent scientist at Hopkins. He became her mentor, and their professional relationship would span many years.

Mall encouraged Sabin to do research. At his suggestion, she developed the first three-dimensional model of the medulla and midbrain from serial microscopic sections of a newborn baby’s nervous system. This research became the basis of Sabin’s An Atlas of the Medulla and Midbrain (1901), which became a widely used textbook. The second project suggested by Mall was a study of the embryological development of the lymphatic system.

In 1900, upon graduation from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Sabin had an internship at Johns Hopkins Hospital, during which she decided she preferred research and teaching to the actual practice of medicine. Attaining a teaching position as a woman would prove to be difficult, however.

Following her internship year, Sabin received a fellowship from the Baltimore Association for the Advancement of University Education for Women that allowed her to continue the research she had started under Mall. A paper she subsequently wrote on the origin of the lymphatic system received the Naples Table Association’s prize for scientific research by women—one thousand dollars, a considerable sum at the time. Sabin was the first recipient of the prize, which also resulted in a research position at the Stazione Zoologica (Zoological Station) in Naples, Italy. She spent a year in Naples, then returned to her research at Johns Hopkins.

When Sabin was appointed assistant instructor in the Department of Anatomy at Johns Hopkins in 1902, she became the first woman faculty member at the university. She was made an associate professor in 1905. After Mall’s death in 1917, the school initially selected Lewis Weed, one of Sabin’s former students, to chair the anatomy department; threatened by protests on the part of Sabin’s friends, however, Johns Hopkins reconsidered and hired Sabin as a professor of histology, making her the first woman to become a full professor at the school.

While a professor at Johns Hopkins, Sabin did groundbreaking work on the origins of the lymphatic system. Her work included studies demonstrating that the structures of the lymphatic system are formed from embryonic veins and not from other tissues. As part of her research, she used a method of staining cells that facilitated the study of living cells.

By the early 1920s, Sabin was anxious to devote more of her time and effort to research. She became the first woman to head the Department of Cellular Studies at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1925. From her arrival at the institute in 1925 until her departure thirteen years later, Sabin led research on the mechanisms of tuberculosis, and her team made major strides in furthering understanding of the disease. Between 1930 and 1934, she wrote a biography of Franklin Mall, the man who had acted as her mentor at Johns Hopkins.

Upon retiring from the Rockefeller Institute in 1938, Sabin moved back to Colorado. She lived with her sister and corresponded regularly with her research colleagues. She also attended conferences and served on the boards of many organizations. In 1944, Sabin chaired the Health Committee of Colorado’s Post–War Planning Committee at the behest of Governor John Vivian. As chair, she investigated health services in the state and, finding them deficient in funding, staffing, and legislative support, became a passionate advocate for health-service reform. She drafted a number of bills that became known as the Sabin Program. Although she worked hard to ensure the success of her program, only four of its six bills were passed in 1947.

Following her time as chair of the Health Committee, Sabin served as chair of the Interim Board of Health and Hospitals of Denver until 1951. Next, she served as manager of the Denver Department of Health and Charities, where she launched an initiative to improve sanitation in the city. The initiative included enforcing existing health regulations for restaurants and food suppliers, as well as testing for tuberculosis and syphilis.

Impact

Florence Sabin was a remarkable woman whose life was made up of many significant firsts. She was not only the first woman to hold faculty and other important positions at prestigious institutions but also the first researcher to prove new theories on the development of the lymphatic system. It was Sabin who devised a new technique to observe living cells. Her “hanging drop” technique allowed her to observe the formation of stem cells and their eventual function as red and white blood cells in living chick embryos. She was also the first person to see a heart beat in a chick embryo. With her new staining techniques, it was possible to tell the various blood cell types apart for the first time.

In addition, Sabin’s work with tuberculosis brought her acknowledgement from the National Tuberculosis Association, along with a grant to support her work. Her testing program reduced the incidence of tuberculosis in Denver from 54.7 per 100,000 people to 27 and the frequency of syphilis from 700 per 100,000 people to a mere 60, both large gains in the area of public health.

Sabin was well known during her lifetime and received a number of honors and awards, including some that had never been given to a woman before. She was the first female president of the American Association of Anatomists (1924) and the first woman to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1925). Among her other honors are the Trudeau Medal of the National Tuberculosis Association (1945) for her early work on the disease and the Lasker Foundation’s Public Service Award (1951) for her public health work in Colorado. The medical school of the University of Colorado dedicated a new biological sciences building in her honor in 1951. In 1959, she was honored with a statue in the National Statuary Hall of the US Capitol.

Bibliography

Bluemel, Elinor. Florence Sabin: Colorado Woman of the Century. Boulder: U of Colorado P, 1959. Print. A biography of Sabin, written by a physician’s wife and librarian who knew Sabin personally. Includes a bibliography.

Morantz-Sanchez, Regina. Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000. Print. A study of women in medicine that discusses Sabin at some length. Originally published in 1985 and reprinted with a new preface.

Sabin, Florence R. The Origin and Development of the Lymphatic System. 1913. Cornell U Lib., 2009. Print. A reprint of Sabin’s 1913 book on the lymphatic system.

---, and Henry M. Knower. An Atlas of the Medulla and Midbrain. Charleston: Nabu, 2010. Print. A reprint of Sabin’s 1901 work on the brain development of newborns, which became a popular and widely used textbook at the time of initial publication.