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PROFILE: Gladys Henry Dick

Biomedical researcher who co-discovered cause, treatment, and prevention of scarlet fever in the early 20th century ranked among female immortals in science

Copyright © 2006 by E. A. Kral

Prior to the 1920s, the contagious respiratory infection known as scarlet fever (also called scarlatina) appeared from time to time in epidemics in various regions of the world.

Primarily a childhood disease characterized by a sore throat, fever, lethargy, and body rash, it sometimes led to serious complications such as rheumatic fever (a heart disease), kidney inflammation, or arthritis. In severe cases, death occurred within 24 hours.

First described by English physician Thomas Sydenham in 1676, its causes and treatments were not well understood. According to The Encyclopedia of Plague & Pestilence: From Ancient Times to the Present, Rev Ed (Checkmark Books/Facts On File, 2001), epidemics of note occurred in the New England states from Vermont to Connecticut in the 1730s and 1790s and in the nations of Australia and New Zealand in the latter half of the 19th century,

"In the latter half of the 19th century, mortalities of 25 to 35 percent were common in the United States, Western Europe, and Scandinavia," reports the scarlet fever entry in Cecil Textbook of Medicine, 22nd. ed, Vol 2 (W. B. Saunders, 2004).

American magazines published articles on scarlet fever in Japan in 1893 and in the United States in 1901, 1903, and 1909. And the authoritative Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol 24 (1911) stated in its scarlet fever entry that one of the first requirements in its treatment "is the isolation of the case, with the view of preventing the spread of the disease."

By 1911, the year that Pawnee City, Nebraska native Dr. Gladys R. Henry relocated to Chicago, where shortly afterwards she began to conduct with her husband Dr. George F. Dick the first successful research to control scarlet fever, there was very little the field of medicine could offer toward understanding the disease despite efforts of researchers worldwide to learn its causes and treatments.

Further complicating the task was the fact this was an era when women faced stereotypes and sex discrimination, according to Margaret W. Rossiter, author of Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), who wrote, in part: "If by 1910 women had succeeded in being allowed to earn degrees from almost all German and American universities granting them to men, they were far less successful in these years in gaining equal treatment in the world of employment."

Yet, Gladys Rowena Henry's family history and educational background as well as her ability and character had prepared her to become one of the notable female pioneer scientists.

Her mother Azelia Edson Henry, daughter of Oliver and Henrietta Alden Edson, was a direct descendant of the Mayflower passenger John Alden, one of the important founders of Plymouth Colony in New England in 1620, according to his entry in American National Biography, Vol 1(1999).

After marrying William C. Henry in Benton County, Iowa in 1873, Azelia lived in Wilber, Saline County, Nebraska from 1876 to 1879, where her husband owned a grain elevator, established a bank, and was among the town's original trustees.

W. C. Henry continued his grain and banking interests in Pawnee City, which had an 1880 population of 763 and an 1890 population of 1,550. He also purchased over 1,000 acres of farmland throughout Pawnee County, including Miles Township, where the village of Burchard was established.

Gladys, one of four children, was born in Pawnee City in December 1881, and attended the local elementary school. At the age of five, she acquired an interest in becoming a doctor when she was taken by her mother to see a neighbor's sick child who suffered a violent attack from a disorder during the visit, reported the lengthy article "Conquest of Scarlet Fever" in the December 1924 Harper's Monthly.

By 1893, the family relocated to 3090 R Street in Lincoln, which by 1900 had a population of 40,169. There, Gladys briefly attended local schools until the fall of 1895 when she enrolled in prep school at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and completed her bachelor of science degree in 1900 at the age of 18.

Of the 188 graduates in her class, she was one of 21 who were elected to the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa honorary society. Alongside the photograph of Gladys Henry in the college annual was the editorial comment: "She's beautiful and therefore to be wooed."

According to some scholars, UNL enjoyed its "golden era" in academics during and after the 1890s, even though by 1900 it had an enrollment of only 2,000 students and 53 faculty members with professorial rank. (There were other teachers with differing, less prominent titles.)

Gladys wanted to enter medical school, but her mother objected, so she took graduate courses at UNL until 1902 in the fields of biology and zoology, then reportedly taught high school biology for one year at Kearney in central Nebraska.

During Gladys Henry's years on the UNL campus, there were several distinguished faculty members present, judging, for example, by entries in American National Biography decades later for Elisha B. Andrews, its chancellor from 1900 to 1908, Charles Bessey in botany, DeWitt Brace in physics, Frederic Clements in botany, Rollins Emerson in horticulture, H. Winnett Orr in medical history, Louise Pound in English, Roscoe Pound in law, Edward A. Ross in sociology, Henry Baldwin Ward in zoology, and Harry K. Wolfe in philosophy/psychology.

Probably most influential in Gladys Henry's collegiate preparation was Professor Henry B. Ward, later called the "father" of American parasitology. He helped strengthen the UNL biological sciences program after 1893 and helped establish the new College of Medicine at the University of Nebraska in 1902. As its first Dean, Ward helped merge the basic science studies at UNL with the clinical training at the Omaha Medical College, the latter originally begun in 1881. The new College of Medicine was completely located in Omaha by 1914.

Gladys' family members also influenced the advancement of her career through their educational pursuits on the East Coast. Her brother Alden E. Henry earned degrees from UNL in 1897 and 1898, then graduated cum laude from law school at Harvard University in 1903, according to his entry in Nebraskana (Baldwin, 1932). After 1915, he resided in Pawnee City as an attorney and supervisor of the family farms in Pawnee County.

Her sister Margaret Edith Henry earned a bachelor's degree from UNL in 1898 with Phi Beta Kappa honors and a master's degree in 1900, then studied philosophy at Bryn Mawr College and Radcliffe College before earning a doctorate from Columbia University in 1906.

Beyond that, Edith was married in 1904 to Alvin Johnson, who had earned degrees from UNL in 1897 and 1898, then a doctorate from Columbia University in 1902. Their marriage was unusual in that Edith Henry Johnson home-schooled their seven children before they all attended college and earned their degrees.

Gladys' brother-in-law Alvin Johnson, who taught economics at several colleges, including UNL from 1906 to 1908, later became distinguished for co-founding in 1919 the New School for Social Research, helping to edit from 1926 to 1935 the 15-volume Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, and co-drafting for passage by the New York Legislature in the 1940s the first bill to ban discrimination in employment, reported his entry in American National Biography, Vol 12 (1999).

Another significant family event was the death of Gladys' father W. C. Henry at Lincoln in January 1903, resulting in the relocation of her mother to the Pawnee County village of Burchard, which in 1900 had a population of 297. (It was the birthplace in 1893 of Hollywood silent film comedian Harold Lloyd.) For over a decade, Azelia Henry managed the family estate, including the farmland throughout the county, from her Burchard home at Lot 7, Block 21, which was co-owned for several years with her children Alden and Gladys.

At about the same time, Gladys Henry left for Baltimore, Maryland to attend Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she earned her medical doctorate in 1907, and became the fourth woman to be elected to Alpha Omega Alpha, the oldest honor medical society in the world, currently claiming over 125 chapters in Canada, Puerto Rico, and the United States.

"Though Johns Hopkins admitted female students it provided no residences. Gladys Henry early demonstrated her independence and business acumen by organizing the women to buy their own house," states her entry in Notable American Women: The Modern Period (Belknap Press, 1980). After graduation, she served her internship at Johns Hopkins Hospital and was an assistant resident physician, gaining an introduction to biomedical research there and during a required year of foreign postgraduate training in Berlin, Germany.

After her 1911 relocation to Chicago, likely influenced by the fact her sister Edith was there with husband Alvin Johnson, who taught at the University of Chicago during the 1910-1l school year, Dr. Henry began work in the laboratory of Children's Memorial Hospital, reported the December 1924 Harper's Monthly article, where she studied scarlet fever cases and herself contracted the disease.

Published accounts vary, but she also affiliated with other local institutions, including Rush Medical College (the 1914 Chicago City Directory listed her as an instructor there) and Evanston Hospital. For a time, Gladys also held a private practice in Evanston, the city of her residence until 1953.

During her early years in the Chicago area, she met Fort Wayne, Indiana native Dr. George F. Dick, a 1905 Rush Medical College graduate who engaged in research and private practice before serving as a pathology professor at Rush from 1918 to 1933, then as chairman of the University of Chicago Department of Medicine from 1933 to the late 1940s. (See Chicago Medical Directory for the years 1912 to 1953 and his obituary in the October 14, 1967 New York Times.)

At the time they met, he was affiliated with the John McCormick Institute of Infectious Diseases directed by Rush pathology professor Ludvig Hektoen from 1910 to 1937. The Institute had been founded by the philanthropy of Chicago's Harold and Edith Rockefeller McCormick, whose son had died of scarlet fever in 1901 at the age of five.

Both Gladys and George had pondered their mutual research interests, decided to study acute contagious diseases, especially scarlet fever, and began their collaboration after she joined him at McCormick Institute. She became Dr. Gladys Henry Dick after their marriage in January 1914, the year they began their search for the cause of the disease.

Within two years, they had verified the results of previous investigators regarding the association of hemolytic streptococcus with scarlet fever and the production of immune bodies. Then they attempted to produce experimental scarlet fever on animals in determining the cause.

But after another two years of testing various cultures of bacteria made from the throats, blood, organs, and secretions of scarlet-fever patients, the Dicks were forced to conclude that animals were not susceptible.

They then used human volunteers and appeared close to identification of the scarlet fever microbe, but there was some question about the purity of the culture. And they knew that less than one half of the persons exposed contract the disease.

At this time, their work was interrupted by World War I, when Gladys' husband went to a medical unit overseas. Moreover, her mother Azelia Henry, who had resided with the couple for more than two years, died due to failing health, so burial arrangements were made at the Burchard Cemetery in Pawnee County, Nebraska, reported the February 21, 1918 Pawnee City Republican. And Gladys was stricken with the Spanish flu that had spread that year throughout the world.

After the war ended, and their experimental cultures in the laboratory had dried up, the Dicks resumed their work, which included inoculating themselves with the materials before testing them on human volunteers.

Finally, in October 1923, a case of scarlet fever was obtained by inoculation with a pure culture of hemolytic streptococcus isolated from a lesion on the finger of a nurse who had acquired the disease while caring for a convalescent scarlet fever patient.

The Dicks had achieved a medical breakthrough after a decade of determined, painstaking scientific investigation and funding from various sources, including the Otho S. A. Sprague Memorial Institute and the McCormick Institute of Infectious Diseases. They had identified a specific toxin produced by the bacteria.

In 1924, they were able to develop a skin test to determine susceptibility, which became known worldwide as the Dick test. Then after injecting increasing amounts of the scarlet fever toxin into horses, they produced an antitoxin for those individuals who had already contracted scarlet fever. And later they formulated a vaccine to prevent the disease by subcutaneous injections of sterile scarlet fever toxin in a series of doses over a five-week period.

Though immunization was only temporarily effective with some people, the Dicks' research showed that over a period of 10 years, 90 percent remained immune.

Eventually, they developed a toxin administered by mouth. According to their easy-to-read 149-page book Scarlet Fever (Year Book Publishers, 1938), the oral method was useful for persons with hemophilia and in shortening the time required to get an institution, such as a school, out of quarantine in as little as 12 days. But there were practical difficulties involved.

At a June 1940 convention of the American Medical Association, they reported progress in developing a tablet for preventing and curing scarlet fever. And a February 17, 1945 New York Times article reported the Dicks were issued U.S. Patent 2,369,218 for a concentrate that could be formed easily into tablets or capsules for quicker immunization than by the hypodermic injection method.

Despite the Dicks' widespread publicity and success, they were subject to controversy because they patented their preparation and manufacture methods for the toxin and antitoxin discoveries in 1924 and beyond. Some researchers believed their patent protection seemed characteristic of commercialism, though the Dicks stated their concern was for the quality of serum production. In fact, their desire to retain control over the production process resulted in a lengthy but successful lawsuit against Lederle Laboratories in 1930.

As early as 1928, some authorities argued that private persons like the Dicks should not have patent rights over effective therapeutics like the streptococcus serum because it represented a monopoly and prevented other researchers from making improvements. In 1935, the League of Nations health organization asserted that their patent rights, which by then had extended beyond the United States to Canada, Ireland, and England, interfered with the League's efforts toward biological standardization.

By the end of the 20th century, however, it was more common for laboratory researchers to protect the integrity of their creations via patents, suggesting the Dicks were decades ahead of their time.

Aside from dedicating some 30 years to scarlet fever investigation with her husband, Gladys Henry Dick also contributed her biomedical expertise to the Cradle Society of Evanston, Illinois, founded principally by Mrs. Florence Walrath in 1923. Among its first board of directors were Mr. and Mrs. Charles Gates Dawes, whose residence at 225 Greenwood has housed the Evanston Historical Society since 1959. Dawes served as U.S. Vice President from 1925 to 1929, and was co-recipient of the 1925 Nobel Prize for peace.

The Cradle Society was not the first professional adoption agency in America, as erroneously reported in some sources. Research by the Evanston Historical Society and the Spring 1987 issue of Chicago History reveal that the Illinois Children's Home and Aid Society, founded in 1883, may have been the first, becoming professional in 1898. Another early institution is the Gladney Center for Adoption at Fort Worth, Texas, founded in 1887 and chartered by the Texas State Legislature inn 1904.

While babies are not born in the Cradle Society's facilities, they are usually brought to it shortly after birth, and several weeks later are adopted by interested families. Gladys Dick became involved with the Society shortly after an epidemic of intestinal infection in 1927-28 resulted in 27 deaths, forcing the Cradle to consider closing.

She found the babies' illnesses were due, in part, to a germ in the powdered milk, so manufacturers subsequently produced boilable powdered milk. And she discovered there was a cross infection in the nursery itself because the germs were carried from one youngster to another by nurses who had clean, but unsterilized hands. According to an April 9, 1938 Saturday Evening Post article titled "The Cradle," Gladys introduced and implemented what became known as the Dick Aseptic Nursery Technique--sterilization of items and use of aseptically clean hands.

Gladys was a member of its board of directors from 1928 to 1936 and a member of its medical advisory staff from 1937 to 1953. She personally set an example of the Cradle Society's objective in 1930 by adopting with her husband two children when she was almost 49 years of age.

While Gladys and her husband were nominated by the Gorgas Memorial Institute of Chicago for the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1925, it was not awarded that year. Some scholars believe they were passed over due to what at the time was the Dicks' unorthodox practice of obtaining patents. On the other hand, Margaret W. Rossiter in her 1982 book noted that Nobel Prizes were given in only three fields of science--physics, chemistry, and medicine/physiology, "those fields that had been and were remaining the least receptive to women." Previously, the only woman to earn Nobel Prizes in these male-dominated fields was Marie Curie.

As for other recognition of their scientific achievements, both Gladys and her husband were awarded the Charles Mickle Fellowship in 1926 from the faculty of medicine at the University of Toronto in Canada, and the Cameron Prize in 1933 from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland for their contribution to practical therapeutics. (Just two years earlier, French physicist Marie Curie received the Cameron Prize for therapeutic advances resulting from her discovery of radium earlier in the century.)

Gladys did receive honorary doctorate degrees from Northwestern University in 1928 and from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1940. She was listed in the November 27, 1940 New York Times among 100 outstanding career women by the Woman's Centennial Congress, representing the fields of business, education, engineering, home economics, law, medicine, newspaper and publicity, public service, science, social service, theology, and miscellaneous. According to research by the Evanston Historical Society, an endowment in honor of Gladys Dick existed at the Evanston Northwestern Healthcare Hospital from 1965 to about 2000.

At present, scarlet fever is no longer the fearful disease it once was, as the efforts of the Dicks and others, such as Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, contributed to the significant lessening of its occurrence. And as reported by the Cecil Textbook of Medicine, cited earlier, those who do contract the disease can usually recover 4 to 5 days after penicillin treatment, with the rash disappearing in several weeks.

For her role in controlling scarlet fever for the first time in world history, Gladys Henry Dick is the subject of biographical entries in several leading references, such as Notable Women in the Life Sciences: A Biographical Dictionary (Greenwood Press, 1996) and Notable Twentieth-Century Scientists, Supplement (Gale, 1998) and American National Biography, Supplement 1 (Oxford University Press, 2002).

A short entry on her is also included in "Immortal Women: Essays in Medical Eponyms Part II," American Journal of Surgical Pathology, Vol 25 (October 2001) 1326-1333.

After 1953, the Dicks moved from their home at 1015 Greenwood Boulevard in Evanston, Illinois to Palo Alto, California, where Gladys suffered from declining health during her retirement years. An August 23, 1963 Chicago Tribune obituary reported she died on August 21 at the age of 81 at Menlo Park, California, and was survived by her husband, her daughter Rowena Kelley, and her son Roger H. Dick.

Gladys Henry Dick's cremated remains were interred alongside the gravesites of her parents in the Henry family lot in the Burchard, Nebraska Cemetery located in Section 18 of Plum Creek Township, Pawnee County, just half a mile south and half a mile west of Burchard, a village of 103 persons at the turn of the 21st century.

For more information, consult "900 Famous Nebraskans" on the Internet at www.nsea.org or www.byjake.com/gagecountymuseum or www.nebpress.com.

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