How These Three Women Halted A Plague During The Great Depression
If you attend Michigan State University, perhaps you’ve seen a sculpture of three women standing outside the University Research Center titled “Adulation: The Future of Science.”
The statue depicts Pearl Kendrick, Grace Eldering, and Loney Clinton Gordon, the three women who developed the whopping cough vaccine.
By the 1930s, whooping cough killed thousands of people and children yearly. The United States was already in extremely dark times, with the Great Depression making it nearly impossible for families to stay afloat.
Whooping cough became especially bad in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1932. That’s when Dr. Pearl Kendrick, the Associate Director of Laboratories at the Michigan Department of Health, and her associate, Grace Eldering, decided to research whooping cough. They would work in the lab after business hours with no funding at the start of their research.
Pearl and Grace began reaching out to the Grand Rapids community for funding and support. Schools, community leaders, healthcare workers, parent groups, etc., all began to pitch in and donate to help support their research.
They would go door-to-door, collecting samples from sick children to use so they could develop a vaccine for whooping cough.
They would have each child cough onto a “cough plate” so that they could collect specks of the bacteria and study them.
After working tirelessly to collect samples and conduct research, they finally created a whooping cough vaccine that they distributed in small batches to local doctors in the 1930s.
It was working, and soon enough, they began doing more work to create vaccines that would work against different strains of the disease.
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Pearl and Grace began giving speeches at local hospitals, medical associations, parent meetings, etc., telling the public how important their research was and encouraging parents to enroll their children in their vaccine trials. In 1936, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited their lab and gave them funding.
Their vaccines started getting more widely distributed in 1938, and in the 1940s, African American chemist Loney Clinton Gordon joined in their work along with several other female scientists.
Loney was responsible for working with thousands of culture plates and was able to identify its most powerful strain, which was imperative to creating an effective vaccine.
In 1944, the American Medical Association added their vaccine to its recommended immunizations list. It was distributed across the United States, and cases of whooping cough fell drastically, by over half, in that decade.
Reports say that these three scientists were very humble and never made the media attention on the groundbreaking vaccine about themselves. However, today, it’s clear that they deserve so much recognition and praise.
Pearl continued to work for the University of Michigan as a faculty member, then at the Michigan American Society for Microbiology before she passed away in 1908.
Grace became the Chief of the Western Michigan Laboratory of the Health Department until she retired in 1960.
She then went on to volunteer and work with handicapped and disabled children before she passed away in 1980.
Loney worked for the Michigan Department of Health before retiring in 1978. She passed away in 1999.
These three women were so accomplished and worked tirelessly until they were able to save countless lives for generations to come.
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