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Harriet Jane Lawrence was a person of the to start with feminine pathologists in the U.S. In the early 1900s she labored in Portland, Ore., the place she hunted microbes and made vaccines and serum therapies with the support of 200 guinea pigs that she held in her garage. Her get the job done on a vaccine in the course of the 1918 influenza pandemic attained her presidential recognition and has had a lasting impact on medication.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
AMY Scharf: I’m Amy Scharf, Co-Government Producer of Misplaced Females of Science, and your host for this episode of From Our Inbox, a series of mini episodes that includes girls in science who’ve been brought to our awareness by you, our listeners.
On today’s episode, we abide by a idea from Gloria Hodes, a singer and performer primarily based in New York. She wrote in about a scientist named Harriet Jane Lawrence, a pathologist functioning in Oregon in the early 1900s.
Producer Erica Huang brings us her tale.
Essie Jenkins: “1919 Influenza Blues”:
It was in nineteen hundred and nineteen

Yes males and ladies was dyin’,
Erica Huang: This is Essie Jenkins, singing a tune known as “1919 Influenza Blues”.
Essie Jenkins: With the things which the physicians termed the flu.
Erica Huang: If you don’t know about the 1919 Influenza that she’s singing about right here, also known as the Spanish Flu or the 1918 flu, you are not alone – right up until our additional latest pandemic brought on a surge in interest, the 1918 flu was broadly regarded as “forgotten”. Planet War I was taking up all the newspaper genuine estate at the time, and then-president Woodrow Wilson by no means created a one general public statement about it. Regardless of the truth that it killed around 600,000 people today in the U.S. by itself.
And in the refrain that is coming up listed here, Essie sings some lyrics that place to one thing else appealing about this flu.
Essie Jenkins: But it was God’s almighty program,

He was judging this old land
Erica Huang: She says “it was God’s almighty plan. He was judging this outdated land”. And for the people today dwelling (and dying) by means of this flu in 1918, that was the only respond to they had about what was taking place. Due to the fact in 1918, no one particular knew that influenza was brought on by a virus.
Which brings us to scientist Harriet Jane Lawrence.
Gloria Hodes: First of all, she was a single of the very first ladies pathologists in The united states.
Erica Huang: This is Gloria Hodes, who wrote to us about Lawrence.
Gloria Hodes: She was as significantly as I know the 1st woman pathologist in Oregon.
Erica Huang: And Gloria knew her individually. She was a loved ones good friend.
Gloria Hodes: She experienced met my mother at a PTA assembly, and we turned close friends. I normally went to her lab. And she would enable me glance through the microscope and rely cells.
In Portland, so quite a few medical practitioners would of study course seek her products and services. And I would often be in her lab when they would arrive. But I, you know, I was pretty incredibly youthful, and I did not fully understand. I understood that she made use of her guinea pigs, ha!
Erica Huang: This is one thing that is stated consistently in the documents I’ve found about Lawrence. Guinea pigs.
Gloria Hodes: Two hundred guinea pigs!
Erica Huang: That she retained in her garage at her residence in Portland, and utilized basically as guinea pigs – to establish vaccines and serum therapies.
So how did Harriet Jane Lawrence close up in this article in Portland, with 200 guinea pigs in her garage?
Let us go again a little bit.
Harriet Jane Lawrence was born in 1883, in Maine. When she was just 15, she started off educating at a nearby schoolhouse. She utilised the dollars she designed to put herself through college or university, and as a result of medical school at Boston University.
Immediately after graduating, she moved to Oregon and opened her individual laboratory in the Offering constructing, which is one of Portland’s historic landmarks.
As Gloria pointed out, Dr. Lawrence was one particular of the to start with ladies pathologists in the country. And she built it a stage to winner other persons who had been overlooked in the sciences way too. She aided Oregon health care provider Alan L. Hart, who underwent one of the initially recorded situations of gender affirming surgical procedure when he obtained a hysterectomy in 1917. She also wrote him a letter of suggestion, which served him find get the job done as a workers physician.
And then, arrived the flu.
So it is 1918, and hospitals throughout Oregon are stuffed with flu patients – the numbers of contaminated folks hold climbing, and the hospitals are at ability. It’s a pandemic. I’m absolutely sure it’s not far too difficult to imagine what that was like.
I desired to know what the state of American medicine was like in 1918. So I requested an expert.
John Barry: Yes, I’m below due to the fact I wrote a e-book termed The Great Influenza, about the 1918 pandemic.
Erica Huang: This is John Barry.
John Barry: There was a revolution in American medication that was terribly speedy. Genuinely a time period of perhaps three a long time. It went from in all probability the worst in the formulated earth, to quite much equivalent to the finest, from 1890 to just about the time of the pandemic.
Erica Huang: But even nevertheless there had been some wonderful advancements in immunology, and vaccines and antitoxins had been designed to handle some ailments like diphtheria and tetanus, there was still a large amount they did not know. Most importantly:
John Barry: They did not even know what a virus was.
Erica Huang: Bacteria and viruses are basically various. Bacteria are much larger, one cells that can survive on their possess. Viruses are a lot lesser, and they cause infection by entering and multiplying inside the host’s balanced cells. They are more durable to find, and more challenging to focus on.
Erica Huang (interview): It appeared like a ton of the first race to produce remedies and matters like that was fully focused on “which microorganisms is creating this?”
John Barry: Right, as Goethe said, you glance in which you have light. And they recognized bacteria. Many experts all around the region had been striving to concentrate on that microorganisms for a vaccine. They experienced em in Boston, they experienced em in Philadelphia, they had em in New York, you know, they had em in Portland, Oregon.
Erica Huang: Exactly where Harriet Jane Lawrence was working at her lab in the Selling setting up.
So The Oregon Board of Overall health brought an contaminated tissue sample from the navy property in Bremerton, Washington, to Dr. Lawrence’s lab in Portland. And she decides that the germs she’s likely to focus on with her vaccine is hemolytic streptococcus, which had been displaying up again and yet again in flu clients. She isolates the pathogen from the sample, and grows a society of it – then uses that to develop a batch of the vaccine. This was an arduous and time consuming procedure – at minimum 3 weeks of get the job done. And she and her contemporaries close to the place have been working towards a flu that was relocating via the population at breakneck velocity.
So this begs the concern, proper – if all these scientists were pulling all these sleepless nights acquiring the improper factor, was all this get the job done in vain? No. Here’s why.
Michael Worobey: The extensive bulk of men and women who died from flu, died of secondary bacterial pneumonia.
Erica Huang: This is Michael Worobey, a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, supplying a talk at The University of Arizona about the part that pneumonia performed in the 1918 pandemic.
Michael Worobey: It is the way flu has usually killed, and it’s the way it kills now.
Erica Huang: And people obtained pneumonia through the germs that invaded their devices, after they have been contaminated with the virus. One particular germs in particular was a frequent culprit: Hemolytic Streptococcus. And this is the bacteria that Dr. Lawrence’s vaccine qualified.
Michael Worobey: Pneumonia is genuinely, truly lethal. It produces inflammation, fluid buildup in your lungs, the place you have to have them distinct for oxygen. And which is what killed individuals in 1918.
Erica Huang: I need to say, we really do not know specifically how a great deal of an influence her distinct vaccine had on pneumonia in flu clients. There are different strains of micro organism that lead to pneumonia, and her vaccine would have only labored from a subset of them. But in 2010, there was an posting published in the Journal of Infectious Disorders, which analyzed a variety of scientific tests on these bacterial vaccines. And it implies that hemolytic streptococci vaccines furnished “significant protection” against pneumonia and mortality.
So, was this perform in vain? No! It wasn’t a fantastic remedy, but it most probably saved lives. And also, the vaccines that have been established to combat pneumonia for the duration of that time, are even now encouraging us out right now.
John Barry: The pneumonia vaccine you get nowadays is a straight line descendant of just one that was developed all through the pandemic.
Erica Huang: Dr. Lawrence’s vaccine was dispersed to flu individuals across Oregon. And Lawrence was acknowledged on a countrywide scale for this function.
Gloria Hodes: President Woodrow Wilson honored her for the work that she did on this.
Erica Huang: In the decades following the worst of the pandemic, Physician Lawrence continued to create vaccines and serums to fight diseases (this is in which the garage comprehensive of guinea pigs arrives in).
She also became a fellow with the American Society of Scientific Pathologists, and served on the govt committee of the Health-related Club of Portland.
Gloria truly did not know about any of this, right up until she recently appeared Health care provider Lawrence up as she was planning to share her tale with us.
Gloria Hodes: I just experienced no thought. To me she was just sweet Dr. Lawrence, with the little wispy grays in her confront when she would occur for supper. She was – she was astounding!
Erica Huang: Gloria is not a scientist.
Gloria Hodes: I am a singer and a performer.
Erica Huang: But in her tales about Medical professional Lawrence, you can hear the adore of science getting handed down – the items Physician Lawrence amazed upon her, that ended up probably more critical to share than the accolades. The question of the lab, and the lookup for the unseen.
Amy Scharf: This episode of Missing Women of all ages of Science: From Our Inbox was created and engineered by Erica Huang, and recorded at Great Studio in Brooklyn. Our executive producers are Katie Hafner and myself, Amy Scharf. Lizzy Younan composes our music. Distinctive thanks to Gloria Hodes, John Barry, and Bob Wachter. We get our funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Schmidt Futures. PRX distributes us and our publishing spouse is Scientific American.
Listed here at Misplaced Women of all ages of Science, it is our purpose to rescue woman experts from the jaws of obscurity, but we will need your support! If you know a feminine scientist who’s shed to history, please allow us know! You can go to our website and ship us an email at Lostwomenofscience.org. You will also uncover the mobile phone range to our suggestion line. We enjoy getting calls to our idea line.
Many thanks for listening.
Even further looking at:
Barry, John M. The Terrific Influenza. Penguin, 2020.
Carr, Sujittra Avery. Beyond Suffrage: Giving Voice to Oregon’s Unsung Females in Drugs.
Clyde, Velma. “Doctor Honored By University.” The Oregonian, 9 Dec. 1963.
Najera, Rene F. DRPH. The 1918-19 Spanish Influenza Pandemic and Vaccine Advancement.
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