CWHP Home | Alphabetical Index | Topical Index
Cambridge Women's Heritage Project ~ T ~ |
Taussig,
Helen Brooke
Taylor, Katharine
Thomas, Helen Meriwether (Lewis)
Thompson, Mary Crutchfield
Turner, Ruth Dixon
Helen
Brooke Taussig (b. May 24, 1898, in Cambridge, d. May 20, 1986,in
Kennett Square, Pennsylvania)
Pediatric cardiologist
Born in Cambridge to Edith (Guild) and Frank W.
Taussig, a professor of economics at Harvard University, Helen Taussig graduated
from the Cambridge School for Girls in 1917 and went on to study at Radcliffe
College for two years. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley,
and then returned to her family home in Cambridge to study at Harvard Medical
School. She conducted research on the heart, but could not receive a degree
since the school did not formally admit women at that time. (Women were not
admitted to the Medical School until 1948.) After taking courses in anatomy
at Boston University, she moved to Baltimore to attend John Hopkins University
School of Medicine, earning her MD degree in 1927. Obtaining a fellowship in
cardiology, she combined her interest in the heart with work in pediatrics.
She remained at Johns Hopkins for the rest of her career, becoming one of the
first women to attain the rank of full professor at the University by 1959.
Taussig is best known as the founder of pediatric
cardiology. She suffered from partial deafness and was unable to use a stethoscope,
which forced her to rely on other means of physical examination to diagnose
congenital heart problems in children and led her to use the new technology
of x-ray fluoroscopy. With the heart surgeon Alfred Blalock, she pioneered an
operation in 1944 to correct the “blue baby” syndrome, a congenital
heart syndrome in which an infant is born with a leaky septum of the heart and
an undeveloped pulmonary artery. Her book, Congenital Malfunctions of the
Heart (1947), became a classic on the subject. In the early 1960s, she
traveled to Germany to examine children born with phocomelia (severely shortened
limbs) as a result of their mothers’ use of the anti-nausea drug, thalidomide.
Her testimony before the Food and Drug Administration successfully kept this
drug out of the United States.
She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom
in 1964 and became the first woman president of the American Heart Association
in 1965. Along with many other honors, she was elected a member of the National
Academy of Sciences in 1973. She died in Pennsylvania in an automobile accident
at the age of eighty-seven.
References: Marilyn Ogilvie and Joy Harvey, Biographical
Dictionary of Women Scientists. Routledge, 2000; Phyllis J. Read and Bernard
L. Witlieb, The Book of Women’s Firsts, New York: Random House,
1992; www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/physicians/biography_316.html
Katharine
Taylor (b. June 24, 1888 in Hartford, Connecticut, d. March
12, 1979, in Cambridge, Massachusetts)
Educator, Director of the Shady Hill School 1921-1949
Born on June 24, 1888 in Hartford, Connecticut,
Katharine was the daughter of Graham Taylor and Leah (Demarest) Taylor. She
attended local Hartford elementary schools and then the Francis W. Parker School
in Chicago, while her father was involved with the establishment of the settlement
house, Chicago Commons. She went to Vassar College, graduating with an A.B in
1910. She received her Masters degree from the University of Michigan in 1911.
After traveling to Europe on an academic scholarship, she returned to her Vassar
College as instructor in English from 1913-1916 and then joined the faculty
of her former secondary school, the Parker School in Chicago, where she worked
from 1916-1921. Unlike her older sister, Lea Demarest Taylor, who followed her
father into settlement work, Katharine was dedicated to the field of education.
In 1921 when the philosopher, William Ernest Hocking
and a group of other Harvard professors were looking for someone to direct a
new coeducational and progressive school in Cambridge for their children, she
was appointed as the first director of the Shady Hill School. She held that
position for twenty eight years. One of the notable students under her directorship
was the poet and writer, May Sarton, who described
her experiences in one of her journals. Taylor also developed a teacher's training
course that was highly successful, inspiring one of the graduates, Carmelita
Hinton, to found Putney School in Vermont in 1934.
Retiring from Shady Hill in 1949, Taylor was made chair of the Education and
Child Care Project in Germany under the auspices of the Unitarian Service Committee,
a position she held until 1953. She went on to serve as consultant to the New
World Foundation from 1955 to 1976 and as consultant to the International Schools
Foundation from 1959 to-1960. Taylor sat on the board of Vassar College, Francis
W. Parker School, Children to Palestine, and the New World Foundation.
Taylor died in Cambridge in 1979. After her death,
her papers were given to the Schlesinger Library which included her correspondence
with Agnes and William Ernest Hocking.
References:
“Learning without drudgery” Time magazine Feb. 10, 1947.
Edward Yeomans. Shady Hill School: The First Fifty Years Cambridge,
Mass.: Windflower Press, 1979.
May Sarton, Recovering: A Journal, 1978-1979,. New York: W.W. Norton
pp 242-244.
Helen
Meriwether (Lewis) Thomas (b. August 21, 1905, in New York City,
d. August 6, 1997, in Cambridge)
Historian of science, astronomer, engineer, editor
Helen Meriwether Lewis began her early education
in New York City, where her mother was a public school teacher, continuing her
high school years at St. Catherine's School in Richmond, Virginia. She earned
her A.B. from Radcliffe College in 1928 in government, but her interest
in astronomy was stimulated by undergraduate work at the Harvard Observatory,
where she assisted Professor Willem Luyten in identifying white dwarf stars.
She married Frederick M. Thomas shortly after her graduation from college and
they had one son. The marriage ended and she found employment in many organizations.
She worked for three years as secretary to Leon Campbell, who headed the American
Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO), then affiliated with the Harvard
Observatory. She joined the Observatory staff under the remarkable woman astronomer
Cecelia Payne-Goposchkin. During
the late 1930s she also began to work towards a Ph.D. in the history of science
under the supervision of Harvard professor George Sarton, preparing a thesis
on the history of observations of variable stars from the second century B.C.
to the nineteenth century A.D. For this, she studied both Latin and Arabic texts.
At the beginning of World War II, her graduate work was interrupted by war work,
and her degree was not awarded until 1948.
Helen Lewis Thomas was “drafted” first
into the Harvard Radio Research Laboratory and, shortly after, into the MIT
Radiation Laboratory, where she worked with the historian of science, Henry
Guerlac, preparing a history of the laboratory. In 1947 she was named a senior
engineer at Raytheon Manufacturing Company, where she remained until 1954, working
on guidance systems. She returned to MIT as an editor and head of publications
at the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics until her retirement in 1971.
In 1986, she was awarded a $50,000 prize by TWA for accurately predicting, thirty
years before, the range, cruising speed, passenger capacity, and use of jet
engines by commercial airlines (earning a listing in the Guinness Book of
World Records). She died shortly before her ninety-second birthday, and
a memorial service was held at Christ Church, Cambridge.
References:
Dorritt, Hoffleit, “In Memory of Helen Meriwether Lewis Thomas, August
21 1905-August 6 1997.” Journal of the Association of Variable Star
Observers ( JAAVSO) 28: 40-46, 2000;
Hoffleit, Dorritt “Eloge: Helen Meriwether Lewis Thomas, 21 August 1905-6
August 1997 [Obituary]” Isis 89: 316, 1998.
Mary
Crutchfield Thompson (b.1902 in North Carolina, d.1985)
Dentist
One of the first African American women to graduate
from Tufts Dental School, Mary Crutchfield was the first black woman to practice
dentistry in the Boston area. The only child of William and Lydia Hatch Crutchfield,
Mary was born in North Carolina and raised in Cambridge, Mass. After graduation
from Tufts College Dental School in 1930, she worked at the Boston Dispensary,
and founded the Children’s Dental Clinic in her Cambridge home on Windsor
Street. She was awarded a certificate in recognition of her contribution to
the community for this clinic in 1938. She also worked as a dentist in the Cambridge
Public Schools.
For a number of summers in the late 1930s, she
worked with the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority’s Mississippi Health Project,
a project initiated by this sorority founded by college trained African American
women. She later served as the AKA chapter president.
She married Oscar Thompson in 1948. The couple,
who later moved to Natick, Mass., believed in bringing races together and founded
one of the first Fair Housing committees in America. The NAACP presented her
with an outstanding achievement award for humanitarian services in 1973. In
1976 Alpha Kappa Alpha honored her by establishing in her name a scholarship
at Tufts Dental School for female African American students.
References:
Oral history of Mary Crutchfield Thompson in Black Women Oral History Project,
conducted by Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe and in the Sophia Smith Collection,
Smith College Northampton MA.
Schlesinger Library, online Flickr photo album, link viewed February 23, 2015:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/schlesinger_library/13270319163/
Black Women in America, A Historical Encyclopedia ed. Darlene Clark,
Carlson Publishing, Inc.,1993.
Ruth
Dixon Turner (b.1914, d. April 30, 2001, in Cambridge)
Biologist, malacologist
Ruth Turner was a biologist and Curator of Malacology
(mollusks) at Harvard Museum of Comparative Biology. She earned her bachelor's
degree in education at Bridgewater State College and a master’s degree
in ornithology at Cornell University. She studied under William Clench, then
curator of mollusks at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, who continued
to support her work. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in 1954 from the Harvard
biology department (then granted to women only through Radcliffe College). She
co-edited with Clench the journal Johnsonia, dedicated to western Atlantic mollusks.
After Clench retired, Turner took over his position at the Harvard museum. She
became the world’s expert on teredos, wood-boring bivalve mollusks, popularly
known as “shipworms.” For this reason she was affectionately called
“Lady Wormwood.” The U.S. Office of Naval Research funded much of
Turner's research for over thirty years and found her work essential in understanding
the deterioration of ships and dockage areas caused by shipworms. Working in
collaboration with Dr. Robert Ballad of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution,
she used her knowledge of teredos to explain why wood remained in the wreckage
of the doomed ocean liner the “Titanic”.
Turner was the first female scientist in the world
to utilize the deep submergence research vehicle known as ALVIN for oceanographic
research. An avid scuba diver well in to her 70’s, she was one of the
first female members of the prestigious Boston Sea Rovers and was honored with
their Diver of the Year Award in 1972. She mentored hundreds of young biologists
and readily provided free room and board at her Cambridge home to needy graduate
students. In 1976, when affirmative action was implemented, Turner became one
of Harvard’s first tenured women professors as the Alexander Agassiz Professor
of Malacology. Before her death, she received many awards and honorary degrees
and served as consultant to many scientific organizations.
References:
Harvard Gazette, May 2001
http://www.sciencenetwork.com/turner/obituary.html
Cambridge
Women's Heritage Project
March 27, 2007