By Carla Crowder
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer

Colorado was a sanitation nightmare in the years before World War II.

Babies were dying from impure milk. Tuberculosis was killing their parents. Beautiful, mountainous Colorado ranked among the least healthy states in the country in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Then Dr. Florence Rena Sabin moved back home.

Already one of the country's top medical scientists, this small, serious woman reformed Colorado's public health system, persuading the legislature that the state's 71-year-old health laws were dangerously outdated.

Sabin was even older than those health laws when she started her crusade. She was 73.

Cleaning up Colorado was a second career for Florence Sabin.

By the time she got back to Colorado, where she was born and lived as a young girl, Sabin had earned some of the most prestigious honors in medicine: first woman to graduate and hold a full professorship from Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland; first woman at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York; director of the American Society for the Control of Cancer.

Sabin's father, George Sabin, was from New England but followed the lure of gold to Colorado. He found great success in the gold mines, and married Serena Miner, a Central City school teacher.

They had two daughters, first Mary, then, Florence two years later in 1871.

Florence and Mary moved around a lot as children. First to Denver, where they attended the Broadway School near their home at 18th Avenue and Grant Street.

After their mother died on Florence's seventh birthday, George Sabin sent his daughters to live with relatives in Chicago and then in Vermont.

For college, Florence chose Smith College, following in Mary's footsteps. There she became fascinated by science.

Florence Sabin went on to earn her degree in medicine from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1900.

Through hours of tedious research and caring teaching, Sabin gained fame as a world authority on blood cells. She studied tuberculosis -- at that time the biggest killer in the country -- and researched the lymphatic and nervous systems.

"This was an era when it became apparent that you had to understand biology at the cellular level in order to really understand disease," said Dr. Robert Shikes, professor of pathology and lecturer in medical history at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

"It was crucial in order to make any advances in medicine to have this information."

Sabin was given honorary degrees at 15 universities. Eventually, she became the first female member of the National Academy of Sciences.

In 1938, at 67, Sabin returned to Denver and to her only sibling, Mary, by then a retired East High School mathematics teacher.

The sisters looked forward to quiet lives of reading Shakespeare and other literary greats in their Cheesman Park apartment.

But Sabin returned to appalling health and sanitation conditions. There was a growing clamor for legislation because of the state's shockingly bad standings in national health statistics tables.

"Colorado had a very dismal public health system. We sort of ranked there with Mississippi," Shikes said.

While the governor and other politicians felt pressure to improve the system, they didn't want to make too many waves or do anything too costly, Shikes said.

So the governor tapped Sabin.

"What's more harmless than a little old lady wearing her hair in a bun and wearing sensible shoes, and who used to do a lot of research in the laboratory?" Shikes noted. "Well, they were wrong. She was amazing."

Sabin went on the warpath.

She visited all 63 Colorado counties, investigating and finding weaknesses.

Scientists have found the "secret weapons against diphtheria and undulant fever," Sabin said. "The knowledge of how to prevent them must be given to every parent. It is their children who die unnecessarily. If parents know the conditions causing these diseases, they will demand a change. I'm taking the truth to the people of my state."

She injected her pleas for changes in the laws with stories about people, not numbers. Babies ill from impure milk, children dying from diphtheria, parents ridden with tuberculosis.

Soft-spoken and stubborn all wrapped into one whirlwind, Sabin demanded the ears of lawmakers.

Some regarded her as a meddling old lady. Her opponents were known to have said they weren't worried about her because she was too old to be a threat.

In 1946, lawmakers opposed or indifferent to the Sabin Health Bills lost their bids for re-election.

The next year, the Colorado legislature passed seven of the eight bills.

The new laws tightened regulations regarding inoculation of dairy herds for the prevention of Bang's disease. They ushered in early detection programs and X-rays for the prevention of tuberculosis and for the care of people afflicted with it.

Before the laws passed, Colorado's maternal death rate was one for every 1,000 women. In less than 10 years, that was halved. The infant mortality rate fell from 38 per 1,000 to 30.

It seems the only professional task Sabin ever failed at was retiring.

In 1948, she was asked to do for Denver what she'd done for the rest of the state. She became city manager of health and charity, then chairwoman of a new Department of Health and Hospitals.

Disease was Sabin's biggest enemy. She started a war on "flies, rats and dirty milk."

She found the city's milk supply dangerous and a staggering number of rats roaming Denver's streets and homes.

After her reforms, Denver's death rate for tuberculosis fell from 54 to 27 per 100,000. Incidence of syphilis dropped from 700 to 60 per 100,000.

When the mayor told her she must accept her salary from the city, she donated it to Colorado General Hospital for research.

In 1951, the new cancer wing at the University of Colorado Medical Center was dedicated as the Florence R. Sabin Building for Research in Cellular Biology.

She turned 80 that year, but she was still fighting what she called the shame of polluted rivers and dirty water supplies.

Sabin died less than two years later after suffering a heart attack while watching a World Series game on television.

In 1959, a bronze statue of Sabin was unveiled in the Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol. Each of the 50 states is allowed two statues to honor its finest citizens.

Colorado made Sabin its first choice.

Colorado Milestones, which appears Tuesdays, is part of a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society. Digital and print copies of historical images available at the Colorado Historical Society (303) 866-2305.

Online: InsideDenver.com, keyword "2000."

On TV: at 10 p.m.: Colorado History: You could call it the Colorado X-Files -- cattle mutilations, black helicopters, UFOs. They're all part of the state's recent history.

October 26, 1999

Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society
© Copyright, Denver Rocky Mountain News