Although Ida Henrietta Hyde was born in 1857, her life story in science sometimes sounds very modern. For one thing she was raised by a single parent, as her father abandoned his wife and five children early in Hyde's childhood; for another she had to scrimp and save and work low-paid jobs to pay for her education; and finally because her early career was set back by perhaps a decade or more because of her family commitments and the endemic sexism of nineteenth and twentieth century society.
A difficult start
As a teenager Hyde worked in a clothing factory, saving money to pay for night school classes at the Chicago Athenaeum. She managed to pass the entrance examinations to the College Preparatory Course at the University of Illinois at Champaign, but had to give up a promising teaching position when her brother fell sick and she returned home to look after her siblings. Finally, at the age of 31 she was able to enrol at Cornell University, and get a degree in Biological Science.
This was the beginning of an extraordinary career: after Cornell a scholarship at Bryn Mawr College where she studied with Thomas Hunt Morgan and Jacques Loeb. Then came an invite to work with Professor Alexander W Götte in Strasbourg, a doctorate from Heidelberg, a project at the Naples Zoological Station, a position at the University of Bern with Hugo Kronecker, a research Fellowship at Harvard, and finally a tenured job at the University of Kansas in 1898, where she became a full professor and head of the Physiology Department in 1905.
She was also a pioneer: the first woman to conduct research at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, the first woman to apply for permission to matriculate with an advanced degree in the natural sciences in Germany (the faculty in Strasbourg did not approve, which is why she had to shift to Heidelberg - even here she was not allowed to attend the physiology lectures, and had to rely on notes taken for her by two laboratory assistants); the first woman to do research at the Harvard Medical School; and the first woman member of the American Physiological Society (and the only female member from 1902-1913)
A thoroughly modern woman
Hyde's best known as the inventor of the microelectrode, but her work was far more diverse. She started by studying the mammalian heart, moved onto marine animals like crabs and jellyfish, then to muscle function, then added in work on the nervous and respiratory system. In Kansas she also started working in public health – a genuine form of 'outreach' activity, where she taught health and sex education in schools and factories, and wrote two textbooks. She also studied elite athletes, including a rather unfortunate experiment where one subject complained he'd taken an overdose of coca cola. One of her last papers was on the effect of music on blood pressure.
She also left a legacy for other women, as she was involved in founding scholarships and other opportunities for women at Woods Hole, at the Naples Zoological Station, and at the Universities of Kansas, Cornell and Bryn Mawr. Towards the end of her life she donated $25,000 to the American Association of University Women to fund a Women's International Fellowship.
What I find particularly inspiring about her story is that it's the positive parts of her career that seem familiar, as well as the problems she encountered. There has been a great deal of discussion recently about the career retardation women face because they tend to take more career breaks for family reasons, and about institutionalised sexism in STEM disciplines, and about the increasing cost of a university education (which may hit female graduates harder as they earn less than their male counterparts). But there are also women who, like Hyde, have enough energy and determination to try to solve the problems they've encountered, whether it's through smart blog posts, Athena Forum initiatives, or Wiki editathons to raise the profile of women.
On that topic, I think Dr Hyde could do with a few more paragraphs…
I'm only here for the octopus
Fine. The day the Kaiser made a royal visit to the Naples Marine Station Hyde was working on the salivary glands of octopuses. She had one anaesthetised on a bench, but claimed that the moment the Kaiser walked in the octopus suddenly started showing 'reflex motions'
in twisting coils in all possible directions, accompanied by eruptions of inky jets.
The Kaiser, who was President of the Prussian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, became irate, threatening to withdraw funding from the institute until he was persuaded that this was reflex movement and not an octopus being tortured.
Hyde, being a multitalented lady, invented a restraint system for flailing octopuses which she described in her octopus paper ('Beobachtungen ueber die Secretion der sogenannten Speicheldruessen von Octopus macropus' published in 1891), and wrote up the whole encounter as 'When the Kaiser met the Devil Fish' for a popular magazine in 1917.
Vanessa will not be tweeting much @HPS_Vanessa today as she's feeling a bit inadequate compared to the amazing Dr Hyde.