Florence Rena Sabin

(b. Nov. 9, 1871 Central City-d. Oct. 3, 1953 Denver; b. Fairmount Cemetery)

Dr. Sabin, the first Coloradan selected for Statuary Hall, in the National Capitol, did more than anyone to improve the lives of all Coloradans. After graduating from Johns Hopkins University, a new medical school in Baltimore that accepted women, she designed a model of a newborn baby’s brain stem and wrote the textbook on the brain and medulla. She became Johns Hopkins’ first woman professor, the first woman member of the National Academy of Sciences and the first woman physician-scientist at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City.

Florence retired at 67 in 1938, returning to Denver to live with her sister. In 1946, Colorado Governor John Vivian, asked her to head the state health committee. To her horror, Dr. Sabin found that Colorado, the home of sunshine, fresh air and health resorts, was one of America’s sickest states. She toured all 63 counties and found Colorado had one of America’s highest infant mortality rates, the fifth-highest diphtheria incidence and the third-highest scarlet fever death rate. Dr. Sabin drew up eight health reform bills that finally passed the state legislature in 1947. Denver’s new mayor Quigg Newton, decided that Denver needed similar medicine. He appointed Sabin Denver’s Manager of Health and Charities. She began a citywide x-ray and treatment program that cut the city’s tuberculosis rate in half and launched a major campaign to teach public health.

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