As part of our series celebrating 60 years of Camden, Karen Golanski @citywalkswithkaren.co.uk uncovers some fascinating facts about a building many people pass by without a second glance. Nestled in the heart of Bloomsbury, The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
The school was founded in 1899 in the docklands area and acted as a kind of quarantine ship. It received its Royal Charter in 1924 and in 1925 bought the land here from the National Theatre Committee who had been intending to build a Shakespeare memorial theatre until the intervention of World War I. This building was opened in 1929. It is faced with Portland stone and is one of London’s first steel framed buildings.
In this blog, I am going to be concentrating on the frieze on Gower St (which continues around the corner into Keppel St) which has the names of pioneers in tropical medicine including Jenner, Lister and Pasteur. However, until 2019 there were no women’s names. Apparently, Florence Nightingale had been suggested but if was thought her name was too long, even thought there was room for Max von Pettenkofer, an obscure Bavarian apothecary!
So, let’s learn about these 3 brilliant women.
Florence Nightingale was born in Florence in 1820 to a well- off family. At the age of 16 she had what she described as a calling from God which she realised later was to care for the sick. Despite her family being horrified because of nursing having a poor reputation in those days, she trained in Germany and Paris, assisted at the Middlesex Hospital during a cholera outbreak, and in 1854 was asked by Secretary of War, Sidney Herbert, to take a group of nurses to the Crimea. She instigated handwashing, hygiene and proper nutrition in the care of wounded soldiers and saved many lives. Famous on her return and known as ‘The Lady with the Lamp’, she set up a training school for nurses at St Thomas’s Hospital in 1860 and was the first woman to receive the Order of Merit in 1907.
Marie Sklodowska Curie was born in Warsaw in 1867. She attended university secretly and studied at night. She received a degree in Maths and Physics from the Sorbonne which is where she met Pierre Curie. Together they discovered radium and polonium (named after the country of her birth). She became the first female professor at the Sorbonne and was awarded Nobel prizes in Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911). In the first world war she helped equip ambulances with X-ray equipment which she drove herself to the front line. She died of aplastic anaemia in 1934 and was buried in a lead-lined coffin.
Alice Ball was an African American chemist born in Seattle in 1892.
She gained a degree in Chemistry at the University of Washington and a second degree in pharmacy. She then became the first woman to receive a masters degree from the University of Hawaii and became the first female professor of chemistry there. She developed an injectable oil extract from the chaulmoogra tree used to treat leprosy, the most effective treatment until the 1940’s. Sadly she died at the age of 24 from chlorine poisoning before her findings had been published and another chemist continued her work, published and took credit for it. Her work was only recognised in 2000 by the University of Hawaii. This work saved about 8000 patients who had been exiled to Molokai, an Hawaiian island.
This blog represents one of the stops on my Pioneering Women in Science and Medicine tour in Bloomsbury. Information on this and my other tours can be found on my website: citywalkswithkaren.co.uk
Karen Golanski