Medicine: Career Woman

When Dr. Florence Rena Sabin went back to Colorado in 1938, she thought she had earned the right to retire and take life easy in her native state. Dr. Sabin, then 67, had been away a long time, gathering high honors in two careers: 1) as a researcher and professor at Johns Hopkins (1902-25), prying into the secrets of the blood stream and the lymphatic glands, and 2) from 1925 on, as the first woman member of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (Director Simon Flexner called her “the most eminent of living women scientists”), working on blood cells and tuberculosis.

For a while Florence Sabin lived contentedly with her elder sister Mary in a Denver apartment. She was delighted to have time for her own cooking. But in 1944, Colorado admirers pushed her into a third career, as chairman of the governor’s committee on a postwar health program. Though Colorado boasted of its healthful air, Dr. Sabin found its death rate from many diseases needlessly high; the state was missing too many bets.

Dr. Sabin stumped Colorado with the slogan, “Health to match our mountains.” Before she knew it, she found herself in politics. Her politicking paid. With aroused public opinion, she bludgeoned the legislature into taking the state health department out of politics, doubling its appropriations, encouraging the formation of county health departments, voting more facilities and funds for T.B. cases. One bill she backed, for compulsory vaccinations of all cattle against Bang’s disease (brucellosis), was beaten by the cattlemen; Dr. Sabin attacked again, and won partial victory with an act requiring vaccination of dairy herds.

In a three-year spell as Denver’s City Manager of Health and Charities, she rid the city of its rat menace, improved sewage disposal, saw to it that no unpasteurized milk could get into the city. She is still battling for better control of stream pollution, still gets a big kick out of working in “a live, growing field like public health.”

This week Florence Sabin (she will be 80 next month) received the $1,000 public-health award of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation. Other Lasker award winners:

¶ Manhattan’s Dr. Elise Strang L’Esperance (TIME, April 3, 1950) and Philadelphia’s Dr. Catharine Macfarlane, for cancer-detection work.

¶ University of California’s Dr. Karl F. Meyer for bacteriological research.

¶ Boston’s Dr. William G. Lennox and Chicago’s Dr. Frederic A. Gibbs, for research in epilepsy.

¶ The Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York, for pioneering in prepaid group medicine.

¶ Alcoholics Anonymous, for helping more than 120,000 chronic drinkers.