Maude Abbott and the Holmes Heart
Today is the 142nd birthday of an amazing Canadian researcher and physician– Dr. Maude Abbott. It’s hard to sum up in a few words just how awesome this lady was. Briefly, she was orphaned as a child and was raised by her grandmother. After graduating high school, she joined one of the first groups of women to enroll and graduate from McGill. Although she was tremendously interested in pursuing medicine, she was not admitted to the McGill medical school which at the time was exclusive to men. So instead, she enrolled in Bishop’s where women were admitted, and later pursued her postgraduate studies in Europe.
When Abbott returned to Montreal, as I outline below, she was able to establish herself as an expert in congenital heart disease. For her work she was awarded an honourary medical degree from McGill and became a professor at the very institution that had some three decades earlier refused to consider her application on the basis of her gender. Being a woman researcher and physician, Abbott faced many challenges in a world where science and medicine were considered to be men’s territory. However, she overcame many of these barriers by the excellence in the quality of her work and her strong character, consequently paving the way for many more women to succeed.
The following is not an autobiographical sketch, but rather looks at a particular artifact of medicine that I had the pleasure of seeing at the McGill Medical Museum earlier this year and how it shaped Maude Abbott’s career.
The Holmes Heart
Rise of Pathological Anatomy in Canada
By Marzieh Ghiasi (Mar 2011)
athological anatomy, the study of altered or abnormal anatomy, is a field that in its early stages relied heavily on the collection and study of specimens. The ‘Holmes Heart’ is one of such specimens. Stored today at the McGill Medical Museum, it gave early modern physicians an understanding of the human body and its pathologies.
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2005-2012 Marzieh Ghiasi.