I heard the most incredible story from one of my science club children this week (we’re connecting virtually during these times of school closures) about his Great Grandmother.
We have been wearing our lab coats in science club to protect us when we do experiments and Z wanted to tell me that his Great Grandma, Dr Elizabeth Dowsett (known as Dr Betty Dowsett), actually invented a much better lab coat for preventing cross contamination in the lab!
It’s called the Dowsett-Heggie lab coat – although I know it as the Howie labcoat, named after a 1978 report commissioned by the UK Department of Health and Social Security to set out standard clinical laboratory practices, chaired by Howie. Nicknamed the “Howie-Style” coat to indicate its compliance with the provisions of this report, it has wrap over closings, elasticated wrists and a mandarin collar1. I wore this style of lab coat for microbiology practicals when I was at University.
However, Z told me that his Great Grandmother was annoyed at how many male doctors were cross contaminating the samples with their ties and their sleeves touching everything, so she designed a lab coat with slimmed sleeves, elasticated wrists, and a closed neck with poppers for easier access (and quicker removal) than buttons. It also had a pocket for pens. Apparently, she invented it by herself (in 19722) but asked her male colleague, James Heggie, if she could add his name to it as she feared it might not have been published in the medical journals of the time. He reluctantly agreed, although he had nothing to do with the design at all.
The family knew nothing of this until she died a few years ago and at a memorial for her run by her patient groups (she was a leading researcher of the causes of ME or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome), a member of the Heggie family was there and told them this amazing story about the lab coat.
Dr Xand van Tulleken (Operation Ouch) even tweeted about supporting all the hidden women of science and recognising their achievements after wearing one of Dr Dowsett’s lab coats on TV!
References
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_coat
2 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(72)90988-9/fulltext
I wore that type of lab coat for so many years and didn’t realise it had been invited because a woman had got fed up with how messy the men in her life were 🙂
Great to read this. My late mother, Mair Thomas, was also a medical student in Edinburgh, and in London was a microbiologist and epidemiologist, (and feminist) and their paths crossed again, as friends and colleagues, but I never knew about the lab coat, surprising as Mair was a keen advocate of infection control. May be it was just because I was grown up at that stage. My mother got in involved in the ‘Royal Free Disease’/ME/CFS work through Betty and I’d hear about it. In the early eighties, when my friend and housemate, Sally, got a malignant melanoma, Betty provided support to her at St Andrew’s Billericay where she had treatment, and until she died, and we kept in touch. While Mair died later in 2014, she didn’t know of Betty’s death because of her dementia. Betty must have had a good memory. Mair visited her when she was unwell, (and she was covering her work) and Betty recited a poem, which Mair enjoyed and asked who had written it. Betty said, ‘You wrote it Mair”. It had been in the student magazine in Edinburgh. My mother had completely forgotten!! Greetings to her descendants, a great grandmother to be proud of.
I worked under Dr Dowsett as Senior Technician in the Microbiology Laboratory at St Ann’s Hospital, Tottenham, from 1969 to 1970 and if my memory is correct, we were already wearing the type of lab coat she had designed. Once worn, it was obvious how much more suited it was to laboratory work than the type of coat in general use at the time.
Elizabeth Dowsett was such a clever, inventive woman and a total joy to work for.