SABIN, FLORENCE RENA

(b, Central City, Colorado, 9 November 1871; d. Denver, Colorado, 3 October 1953)

anatomy, immunology.

The second daughter of Serena M. and George K. Sabin, who had given up the study of medicine to work in the Colorado mines. Florence Sabin attended schools in Denver and Vermont. She followed her sister Mary to Smith College and concentrated on mathematics and science, receiving the B.S. degree in 1893. While at Smith she became interested in women’s rights and also decided to study medicine. The year she received her Smith degree,the Johns Hopkins Medical School opened with the financial help of a group of Baltimore women who stipulated that women be admitted on the same basis as men. Sabin taught mathematics for two years in Denver and zoology for a year at Smith to earn sufficient money to continue her education. She then matriculated at Johns Hopkins Medical School in the fall of 1896.

Sabin began her career in medical research under the stimulus and guidance of Franklin P. Mall, professor of anatomy at the Johns Hopkins Medical School. While still a student she undertook to construct a three-dimensional model of the mid-and lower brain. Her work was published as An Atlas of the Medulla and Midbrain in 1901 and quickly became a popular text. Also in 1901, a year after receiving the M.D. degree, she was appointed to a fellowship in anatomy after completion of an internship. She thus began a twenty-five-year academic association with Johns Hopkins. When she became an assistant in anatomy in 1902, Sabin had the distinction of becoming the first woman faculty member at the school. She was the first women to achieve professorial rank at the Hopkins Medical School when she was promoted to professor of histology in 1917. Three similar distinctions occurred in 1924–1925, when she became the first woman elected president of the American Association of Anatomists, the first woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and the first woman to become a full member of the Rockefeller Institute.

In her early Johns Hopkins years, Sabin worked on the origins of blood cells and the lymphatics. Understanding of the anatomy of the lymph channels was vague at the time. Particularly under debate were the relationship of the smallest lymphatics to the tissue spaces and the embryonic origins of the lymph vessels. One theory held that the lymphatics arose from the tissue spaces and grew toward the veins. The opposing view was that they arose from the veins directly, by a series of small endothelial buds. Using small pig embryos rather than the larger ones used by earlier investigators, Sabin was able to show that the latter view was the correct one.

On numerous summer trips to German laboratories, Sabin learned and brought back techniques. One of the most important of these was supravital staining, the staining of living cells. She used this method in studies on the cellular reaction in tuberculosis and work on the site of antibody production. In 1925 Sabin left her teaching position in Baltimore to establish a laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute in New York that was devoted to the cellular aspects of the immune response. She worked especially with the large mononuclear white blood cells (monocytes), showing their role in the antigen-antibody reaction, a subject not yet fully understood fifty years later.

After thirteen years as a member of the Rockefeller Institute, Sabin became emeritus in 1938 and retired to Denver. She remained active on several national boards; but not until 1944, when she was asked to head a subcommittee on health for the governor’s Post War Planning Committee, did she again work with her usual vigor and efficiency. Colorado had long prided itself as a health resort, and thus it came as a shock when the Sabin Committee began to publicize its findings. The state health department was an ineffective, politically controlled body, and its lack of efficiency and power was reflected in some of the worst health statistics of any state in the nation. Sabin worked tirelessly for the passage of new health laws. In 1947, the year of their passage, she was appointed chairman of the Interim Board of Health and Hospitals of Denver, a post she held until 1951, her eightieth year.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Sabin’s numerous scientific papers appeared for the most part in anatomical journals, Science, and publications of the institutions where she worked. Besides An Atlas of the Medulla and Midbrain (Baltimore, 1901), she contributed a widely cited chapter on the lymphatics to Franz Keibel and Franklin P. Mall’s Manual of Human Embryology, II (Philadelphia, 1912), 709–745, that also appeared as The Origin and Development of the Lymphatic System (Baltimore, 1913). Franklin Paine Mall, the Story of a Mind (Baltimore, 1934) is the standard biography of Mall and reveals much about Sabin’s attitudes as well.

II. Secondary Literature. The most complete book about Sabin is Elinor Bluemel’s Florence Sabin, Colorado Woman of the Century (Boulder, Colo., 1959). Mary K. Phelan, Probing the Unknown (New York, 1969), is for younger readers. The best treatment of Sabin’s scientific contributions is Philip D. McMaster and Michael Heidelberger, “Florence Rena Sabin”, in Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences,34 (1960), 271–305. See also Vincent T. Andriole, “Florence Rena Sabin—Teacher, Scientist, Citizen”, in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 14 (1959),320-350: George W. Corner, A History of the Rockefeller Institute 1901–1953 (New York, 1964), 238–239; Lawrence S. Kubie, “Florence Rena Sabin, 1871–1953”, in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 4 (1961), 306–315; John H. Talbott, A Biographical History of Medicine (New York, 1970), 1181–1183; and Edna Yost, American Women of Science (Philadelphia, 1943), 62–79.

Gert H. Brieger