A Tragic Pioneer

On a crisp December morning in 1926 the Health Officer strode into the pathology lab of Greenwich Hospital.  Dr. Louise Larrimore was in the middle of transferring the culture collection.  She looked up from the row of media-filled test tubes with sterile cotton plugs, and putting down her bacteriological loop, asked, “May I help you?”

Dr. Austen said, “Dr. Larrimore, as you know, our town bacteriologist died suddenly last month and we are finding it very difficult to find somebody to fill his shoes.  I have come to ask you if you would consider functioning as the bacteriologist and doing the public health laboratory work until we find
 someone to replace him.”

Dr. Larrimore replied, Yes I will do it, but I will do the work here in my laboratory at Greenwich Hospital”. 

So in addition to her work for the hospital, Dr. Larrimore took on the public health laboratory work for the town.  Public health differs from the work of a hospital in that a hospital focuses on the individual with a disease, and works to cure them.  Public health looks at the community, to determine what diseases or conditions afflict it, and then develops procedures and programs to reduce the incidence of those conditions in the community as a whole.  Dr. Larimore’s work was demanding and complex, on top of her duties as a pathologist.  She tested milk and drinking water for bacterial contamination.  She performed Widal tests for syphilis, and sputum examinations for tuberculosis.  She examined blood smears for malaria parasites, and set up many cultures for diphtheria.  She prepared annual reports for the Health Officer, and continued to do this for six years, as the Roaring Twenties ended, the Great Depression set in, and the town government appropriated funds to hire 1600 unemployed men to work on the roads of Greenwich.

Dr. Larrimore was a pioneer in her field.  She had graduated in 1915 from the Women’s College of Physicians of Pennsylvania.  This school and a number of others had been founded after the Civil War during a period when women were routinely denied admission to medical colleges.  Her graduating class of twenty-eight, which included one African- American woman, joined about 9000 woman physicians in the United States at the time.  This represented about 6% of the total.  Their numbers were not to increase until the end of the twentieth century- there were actually fewer women doctors in 1940 than when Dr. Larrimore graduated.  But establishing herself in Greenwich, Dr. Larrimore built a distinguished career for herself.  She did research and published papers on the function of the liver, and invented a portable high-powered microscope, for which she won an award in 1937.  The challenges and pressures of her life can only be imagined.  Sadly, she died two years after retiring from Greenwich Hospital shortly after World War II ended, a presumed suicide.

She had, however, helped the Greenwich Department of Health during the period in which they could not find someone to run the lab, and her legacy lives on both in the Department of Health and in the hospital.  We are grateful to her for what she did and for what she represented to women medical professionals in the modern era.

Sources:

Greenwich Health Department Annual Reports, 1928 - 1931

New York Times, 1948

Williams, 1950