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Harriet Jane Lawrence was one of the 1st woman pathologists in the U.S. In the early 1900s she labored in Portland, Ore., in which she hunted microbes and created vaccines and serum therapies with the assist of 200 guinea pigs that she retained in her garage. Her operate on a vaccine during the 1918 influenza pandemic gained her presidential recognition and has had a lasting influence on medicine.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
AMY Scharf: I’m Amy Scharf, Co-Executive Producer of Missing Females of Science, and your host for this episode of From Our Inbox, a series of mini episodes showcasing ladies in science who’ve been introduced to our attention by you, our listeners.
On today’s episode, we stick to a idea from Gloria Hodes, a singer and performer based mostly in New York. She wrote in about a scientist named Harriet Jane Lawrence, a pathologist operating in Oregon in the early 1900s.
Producer Erica Huang provides us her story.
Essie Jenkins: “1919 Influenza Blues”:
It was in nineteen hundred and nineteen

Of course gentlemen and females was dyin’,
Erica Huang: This is Essie Jenkins, singing a tune known as “1919 Influenza Blues”.
Essie Jenkins: With the things which the medical professionals identified as the flu.
Erica Huang: If you really do not know about the 1919 Influenza that she’s singing about here, also referred to as the Spanish Flu or the 1918 flu, you are not alone – until eventually our extra latest pandemic prompted a surge in interest, the 1918 flu was widely regarded as “forgotten”. Planet War I was using up all the newspaper genuine estate at the time, and then-president Woodrow Wilson in no way designed a solitary community statement about it. Inspite of the fact that it killed around 600,000 men and women in the U.S. on your own.
And in the refrain which is coming up right here, Essie sings some lyrics that point to a thing else interesting about this flu.
Essie Jenkins: But it was God’s almighty strategy,

He was judging this outdated land
Erica Huang: She suggests “it was God’s almighty strategy. He was judging this aged land”. And for the people dwelling (and dying) by means of this flu in 1918, that was the only respond to they had about what was going on. Since in 1918, no just one knew that influenza was induced by a virus.
Which delivers us to scientist Harriet Jane Lawrence.
Gloria Hodes: First of all, she was a person of the very first girls pathologists in The us.
Erica Huang: This is Gloria Hodes, who wrote to us about Lawrence.
Gloria Hodes: She was as considerably as I know the 1st woman pathologist in Oregon.
Erica Huang: And Gloria knew her personally. She was a family buddy.
Gloria Hodes: She had met my mother at a PTA conference, and we grew to become mates. I normally went to her lab. And she would let me glance as a result of the microscope and rely cells.
In Portland, so quite a few physicians would of class search for her companies. And I would often be in her lab when they would appear. But I, you know, I was really quite youthful, and I did not entirely fully grasp. I understood that she used her guinea pigs, ha!
Erica Huang: This is something that is pointed out regularly in the data I have identified about Lawrence. Guinea pigs.
Gloria Hodes: Two hundred guinea pigs!
Erica Huang: That she retained in her garage at her property in Portland, and applied pretty much as guinea pigs – to build vaccines and serum therapies.
So how did Harriet Jane Lawrence stop up listed here in Portland, with 200 guinea pigs in her garage?
Let us go back again a bit.
Harriet Jane Lawrence was born in 1883, in Maine. When she was just 15, she began instructing at a nearby schoolhouse. She applied the funds she made to place herself by way of faculty, and as a result of clinical school at Boston College.
After graduating, she moved to Oregon and opened her have laboratory in the Providing constructing, which is 1 of Portland’s historic landmarks.
As Gloria described, Dr. Lawrence was 1 of the 1st ladies pathologists in the place. And she designed it a place to winner other folks who were being forgotten in the sciences too. She aided Oregon physician Alan L. Hart, who underwent one particular of the 1st recorded conditions of gender affirming medical procedures when he acquired a hysterectomy in 1917. She also wrote him a letter of recommendation, which served him locate get the job done as a personnel doctor.
And then, came the flu.
So it’s 1918, and hospitals throughout Oregon are stuffed with flu sufferers – the quantities of contaminated persons keep climbing, and the hospitals are at potential. It’s a pandemic. I’m absolutely sure it’s not too tricky to imagine what that was like.
I desired to know what the state of American medicine was like in 1918. So I questioned an professional.
John Barry: Of course, I’m below since I wrote a reserve identified as The Wonderful Influenza, about the 1918 pandemic.
Erica Huang: This is John Barry.
John Barry: There was a revolution in American medicine that was extraordinarily quick. Actually a interval of maybe 3 many years. It went from likely the worst in the created world, to pretty much equal to the best, from 1890 to just about the time of the pandemic.
Erica Huang: But even while there experienced been some amazing improvements in immunology, and vaccines and antitoxins had been created to address some ailments like diphtheria and tetanus, there was nevertheless a whole lot they did not know. Most importantly:
John Barry: They didn’t even know what a virus was.
Erica Huang: Bacteria and viruses are fundamentally unique. Germs are larger, solitary cells that can endure on their personal. Viruses are significantly smaller sized, and they lead to infection by getting into and multiplying inside the host’s balanced cells. They’re more challenging to find, and more challenging to target.
Erica Huang (interview): It appeared like a great deal of the first race to acquire therapies and factors like that was solely centered on “which micro organism is resulting in this?”
John Barry: Right, as Goethe reported, you look the place you have mild. And they recognized microbes. Numerous scientists all-around the region were being trying to concentrate on that bacteria 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: In which Harriet Jane Lawrence was functioning at her lab in the Advertising building.
So The Oregon Board of Health and fitness brought an infected tissue sample from the navy yard in Bremerton, Washington, to Dr. Lawrence’s lab in Portland. And she decides that the germs she’s going to target with her vaccine is hemolytic streptococcus, which experienced been showing up all over again and once more in flu people. She isolates the pathogen from the sample, and grows a tradition of it – then uses that to generate a batch of the vaccine. This was an arduous and time consuming system – at the very least 3 weeks of operate. And she and her contemporaries all around the nation were being doing the job versus a flu that was going through the inhabitants at breakneck pace.
So this begs the problem, ideal – if all these scientists were pulling all these sleepless evenings acquiring the incorrect thing, was all this get the job done in vain? No. Here’s why.
Michael Worobey: The wide vast majority of individuals who died from flu, died of secondary bacterial pneumonia.
Erica Huang: This is Michael Worobey, a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, supplying a speak at The University of Arizona about the job that pneumonia performed in the 1918 pandemic.
Michael Worobey: It is the way flu has always killed, and it is the way it kills now.
Erica Huang: And persons acquired pneumonia through the bacteria that invaded their techniques, soon after they were being contaminated with the virus. Just one microbes in individual was a common culprit: Hemolytic Streptococcus. And this is the microorganisms that Dr. Lawrence’s vaccine focused.
Michael Worobey: Pneumonia is really, seriously deadly. It results in swelling, fluid buildup in your lungs, exactly where you will need them very clear for oxygen. And which is what killed folks in 1918.
Erica Huang: I should say, we don’t know exactly how much of an impact her specific vaccine experienced on pneumonia in flu individuals. There are distinct strains of bacteria that induce pneumonia, and her vaccine would have only labored against a subset of them. But in 2010, there was an write-up released in the Journal of Infectious Disorders, which analyzed a quantity of reports on these bacterial vaccines. And it suggests that hemolytic streptococci vaccines supplied “significant protection” from pneumonia and mortality.
So, was this do the job in vain? No! It wasn’t a excellent answer, but it most likely saved lives. And also, the vaccines that were being made to battle pneumonia during that time, are even now helping us out these days.
John Barry: The pneumonia vaccine you get these days is a straight line descendant of just one that was developed through the pandemic.
Erica Huang: Dr. Lawrence’s vaccine was distributed to flu individuals throughout Oregon. And Lawrence was identified on a national scale for this do the job.
Gloria Hodes: President Woodrow Wilson honored her for the function that she did on this.
Erica Huang: In the yrs following the worst of the pandemic, Medical doctor Lawrence continued to produce vaccines and serums to struggle diseases (this is where by the garage entire of guinea pigs arrives in).
She also grew to become a fellow with the American Culture of Medical Pathologists, and served on the executive committee of the Professional medical Club of Portland.
Gloria basically didn’t know about any of this, until eventually she not too long ago seemed Physician Lawrence up as she was preparing to share her story with us.
Gloria Hodes: I just had no plan. To me she was just sweet Dr. Lawrence, with the little wispy grays in her confront when she would arrive for dinner. 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 stories about Physician Lawrence, you can listen to the really like of science currently being passed down – the points Doctor Lawrence amazed on her, that had been perhaps a lot more critical to share than the accolades. The wonder of the lab, and the lookup for the unseen.
Amy Scharf: This episode of Missing Ladies of Science: From Our Inbox was developed and engineered by Erica Huang, and recorded at Very good Studio in Brooklyn. Our govt producers are Katie Hafner and myself, Amy Scharf. Lizzy Younan composes our new music. Specific thanks to Gloria Hodes, John Barry, and Bob Wachter. We get our funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Basis and Schmidt Futures. PRX distributes us and our publishing partner is Scientific American.
Listed here at Misplaced Ladies of Science, it is our purpose to rescue feminine scientists from the jaws of obscurity, but we need to have your assistance! If you know a female scientist who’s misplaced to heritage, please allow us know! You can go to our site and ship us an e mail at Lostwomenofscience.org. You can also discover the cell phone selection to our tip line. We appreciate obtaining calls to our tip line.
Thanks for listening.
More looking at:
Barry, John M. The Good Influenza. Penguin, 2020.
Carr, Sujittra Avery. Beyond Suffrage: Giving Voice to Oregon’s Unsung Women 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 Improvement.
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