Cambridge Women's Heritage Project Database, T

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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

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 University Observatory, where she assisted Professor Willem Luyten in identifying white dwarf stars. Although she married Frederick W. Thomas shortly after her graduation from college and had one son, the marriage soon disintegrated. Needing to support herself, 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 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 awarded only in 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 at the age of 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 Wright Thompson (b.1902 in North Carolina, d.1985)
Dentist
One of the first African Americans to graduate from Tufts Dental School, Mary Thompson was the first African Americans to practice dentistry in the Boston area. She was born in North Carolina but raised in the North. 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 St. 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 and her husband 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 currently in the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Northampton MA.); 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 sharp-shelled 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