Colorado Crusader

In Colorado, the fur flew. The cause of the commotion was a grey, chunky, 75-year-old woman, who stumped up & down the state, making three speeches a day, buttonholing businessmen, doctors, politicians, writing letters morning & night. Dr. Florence Rena Sabin, "the greatest living woman scientist" (according to Dr. Simon Flexner, late famed director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research), was out to reduce Colorado's shockingly high death rate from disease.

It all began quietly two years ago, when Colorado's Governor John C. Vivian appointed Florence Sabin chairman of a state postwar health committee. Dr. Sabin, bearing twelve honorary degrees, had come home to retirement in her native state after a busy life, most of it spent over a microscope studying blood cells and tuberculosis. She was the first woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the first woman professor at Johns Hopkins University, first woman member of the Rockefeller Institute.

Dr. Sabin took her new job seriously. Out to survey Colorado's health came two doctors from the American Public Health Association, backed by money from the Commonwealth Fund. They found that: 1) Colorado had the third worst record among the states in per capita deaths from scarlet fever, was almost as bad in diphtheria, pneumonia, infant mortality; 2) in five years more than 1,600 Coloradans (in a population of 1,123,296) had died unnecessarily of preventable diseases.

Death from Inertia. Dr. Sabin quickly determined the reasons: politics-ridden health offices, too few doctors, too few hospitals and health centers (only five of Colorado's 63 counties have full-time health departments), no statewide pasteurization of milk, inadequate inoculation of children, pollution of streams and irrigation ditches. Snorted Dr. Sabin: "We think of our state as a health resort. Yet we're dying faster than people in most states."

Paying expenses out of her own pocket, Dr. Sabin took to the road to rouse Colorado's citizenry. Nobody contradicted her facts; she had nothing to fight but inertia. By last week she had won the warm support of Denver newspapers, P.T.A.s and chambers of commerce, had nailed health planks into both Democratic and Republican party platforms, had five model health bills for the upcoming session of the legislature (including one to take health administration from the governor's control), had badgered Denver's Mayor Benjamin Stapleton into a promise to "consider" a city health survey. Said a Denver health official last week: "Hot damn--that woman is wonderful."

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