Ida Henrietta Hyde M.D., PhD, fought for her right to an education and career in science her whole life. At the age of 14 she was the main provider for her family, including paying for her brother’s university tuition fees. Despite this burden and in the face of her parent’s objections she continued her own education with night classes at the Chicago Athenaeum and she was soon able to pass her entrance exams for the Chicago College Preparatory School. She was inspired by the book Views of Nature by Alexander von Humboldt and by seeing female academics on visits to her brother’s university to pursue an education in science.
She briefly attended the University of Illinois with her brother but was interrupted in her studies by her brother needing her care after falling ill and by her lack of funds – she had used all her own savings to finance one year at the university. To raise funds Ida found work as a teacher after passing both the county teacher’s exam and later the Chicago teacher’s exam. At the age of 31 she enrolled at Cornell University and earned a BA following which she was offered a biology scholarship at Bryn Mawr College where she worked with Jacques Loeb and Thomas Hunt Morgan (Nobel nominee and laureate respectively for work in the fruit fly Drosophila).
Later in her career Ida researched the nervous system of jelly fish at Woods Hole Laboratory and on the back of this work was invited to the University of Strasbourg in 1893. She became the first woman in Germany petitioning the government for matriculation onto an advanced degree in Maths/Natural Sciences but as the complicated procedure was laid out to her she withdrew her attempts and elected to continue her education at Heidelberg where she was eventually awarded a PhD in jellyfish physiology and development at age 39 (as the third woman at this institution). As faculty refused to let her into lectures and laboratories, Ida managed to complete her thesis work with the help of fellow male students and their notes.
Dr Hyde went on to work at the University of Kansas while also studying for an M.D. at Rush Medical College. She became the first ever female researcher at Harvard Medical School and was hired as Associate Professor at KU where she founded the Department of Physiology and served as its first Chairman. She pushed for toilet facilities that could be used by women to be installed in all science buildings on campus and for equal pay. Together with other female academics and wealthy benefactors she also created The Naples Table Association, an organisation providing both financial and professional support for women scientists, and with the Association of American University Women she endowed the Ida H. Hyde International Fellowship and published the revealing journal account “Before Women Were Human Beings” about her struggles for equality.
Through community work in Kansas Dr Hyde also pushed to increase the opportunities for women in a wide array of professions and established a program of examination for communicable diseases in local school children. She was appointed State Chairman of the Kansas Women’s Committee on Health, Sanitation and National Defense in 1918 and gave many public lectures on hygiene and human sexuality and their impact on spreadable diseases. She was the first woman elected into the American Society of Physiologists in 1902 and remained their sole female member until 1913. In 1927 she established a scholarship for women pursuing science careers at KU.
Though never credited as such, it is thought Dr Hyde was also the inventor of the first intracellular micropipette electrode – a device for stimulating cells and recording electrical activity, used to study nerve and muscle cells.