top of page
ALL POSTS


Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
Eight Comets, 2500 Nebulae: Caroline Herschel’s Century of Astronomy
In 2092, if there are still humans on our planet to look and to see, a comet will appear in the night sky that has not been viewed since...
138 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
The Secrets Stars Keep: Lady Margaret Huggins, Pioneer of Spectral Photography
The history of science boasts a robust roster of Vanished Women, wives and sisters who did the work of full partners but received the...
90 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
Valentina Tereshkova: The First Woman in Space
‘It is I, Sea Gull!’ The words, full of meaning both personal for the speaker and cultural for the country listening below, were the...
13 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
She Followed the Sun: Ruby Payne-Scott, the World’s First Woman Radio Astronomer
In March of 1944, a physicist and radar specialist named Ruby Payne-Scott aimed her equipment at the sky and became the world’s first...
17 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
Hydrogen Rules the Universe: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin and the Composition of Stars
‘You are young, and wrong. You must retract.’ When fresh-faced zeal confronts experience, it usually loses. Scientists who think they’ve...
22 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
Nancy Grace Roman and the Birth of the Hubble Space Telescope.
It is an image to inspire almost primordial awe, taken when a space telescope with a rocky past pointed itself towards a black expanse of...
108 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
Margaret Burbridge and the Dawn of Nucleosynthesis Theory
If you had asked a random astronomer in the 1930s how all of the elements in the universe were produced, they would have had a ready and...
234 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
First: The Astrophysics and Astronautics of Sally Ride
Heroes are supposed to be monodimensional, startling and exceptional in one narrow aspect of life and a complex, barely functioning mess...
203 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, the Discovery of HIV, and the Fight Against AIDS
Pandemics. Having raised their heads every century or so to spread primal panic and horror on a continental scale, they were something we...
286 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
War, Fame and Surgery: The Amazing Life of Margaret Chung, the First ABC Woman Surgeon
Her mother was raised in a brothel, and her son was Ronald Reagan. Take any section of Dr Margaret Chung’s (1889–1959) life, and lay it...
73 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
Too Bright: Dr Anandibai Joshee, India’s First Woman Medical Doctor
At 9 years old, a girl named Yamuna Joshee was married to her tutor, a man twenty years her senior, who thereupon changed her first name...
827 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
Killer of Cancer, Slayer of Viruses: The Many Medicines of Nobel Prize Laureate Gertrude Elion
Generally, our experience of a particular medicine is as a great faceless thing the name of which we do not know until we desperately...
246 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
The Last of the Women Physicians: Dorothea Leporin Erxleben.
Prior to the eighteenth century, the answer to the question, ‘Who was allowed to practise medicine?’ was relatively simple: just about...
298 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
Breaking the Shackles Procreative: Margaret Sanger and the Creation of the Pill
In 1912, it was against the law in the United States to publish a book that contained descriptions of birth control methods. It was...
23 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
The Experimentalist: The Tale of Mary Putnam Jacobi vs. Proper Victorian Medicine
As we have seen, the nineteenth century boasts a rich roster of medical women, any one of whom is the stuff of heroes: the trailblazing...
26 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
Lady Mary Montagu and Europe’s First Tool Against Smallpox
In the seventeenth century, smallpox ravaged Europe with a persistent ferocity beyond reckoning. At its height, it killed 400,000...
17 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
The Path of Most Resistance: Sophia Jex-Blake and the Fight for Women’s Medical Education
She had founded first England’s and then Scotland’s first medical school for women, and been instrumental in the passing of the Medical...
382 views
bottom of page