Women In Health History

As we move into the thrid week of the last month of the century, we continue with the women in health history and step In the Classrom and salute some of the women who have contributed to the history of medicine through their skill as teachers.

Maria Montessori was the first female to graduate from a medical school in Italy (1896). While treating children, she began to analyze how they learn. She returned to school to study psychology and soon gave up her medical practice as well as a university chair to focus full-time on educating children. Her teaching methods were first used successfully on mentally disabled children then expanded to all children with her founding in 1907 of the first Casa du Bambini (Children's House) in Rome. Her teaching method is known as Montessori education. Montessori's method of teaching received early support from Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and Helen Keller.

From understanding the importance of beginning a life to the importance of ending a life, we move to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, whose book, "On Death and Dying," published in 1969 openly discussed death. She conducted numberous studies about the fears and taboos of death and even identified the five phases of death while studying terminally ill patients. The phases include: denial; anger; bargaining; depression or grieving; and finally acceptance.

Kubler-Ross fascination with death came from having visited concentration camps just after the end of World War II. And back to the very beginning with Florence Rena Sabin, the first woman to be elected president of the American Association of Anatomisis. She produced a landmark study of the anatomy of a newborn's brain. Her three-dimensional model of the brain, known as the "Sabin model," is a standard teaching aid for medical students.

Sabin was among the early graduating classes that accepted women at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and had already completed her study of the brain before graduating in 1900. She remaind at Hopkins as a teacher, and in 1917, became the first woman to be awarded full professorship at the school. Sabin also was the first to explain how the lymphatic system worked and how the immune system fights off infections.

For more information about these three women, go the links page.

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