Mary Tebb
English physiologist (1868 – 1953)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mary Christine Rosenheim (née Tebb, 1868 – 1953) was an English physiologist. She is particularly known for her work with Otto Rosenheim on the crystalline material protagon.
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Early life
Mary was the daughter of businessman and activist William Tebb and his wife Mary, née Scott. Her brother William was a medical doctor and her sister Florence was a mathematician who, like Mary, studied at Girton. Mary was educated at Bedford College, London, from 1882 to 1887.[1]
Career
At Girton College, Cambridge, Mary studied natural sciences between 1887 and 1893, where she gained a double first and specialised in physiology in Part II. She held a Bathurst studentship and was assistant to Marion Greenwood (later Marion Bidder), leader of the Balfour Biological Laboratory for Women, between 1891 and 1893.[1][2]
She then moved to King's College, London, where she worked at William Dobinson Halliburton's Chemical Physiology Laboratory until 1910, and at the Physiology Laboratory from 1910 to 1916.[1][3]
During this time, she published papers on enzymatic hydrolysis of complex carbohydrates and on the structure of protein fibres in connective tissue. This brought her into a controversy about the nature of reticulin which was not resolved until much later.[4]
Between 1907 and 1910, she collaborated with King’s College’s lecturer in physiological chemistry, Otto Rosenheim, a German chemist who had emigrated to England in 1894 to escape antisemitism.[5] They studied protagon, a crystalline material produced by the brain, and established that it was a mixture rather than a chemical compound.[3] In the words of an obituarist, 'They laid the bogy of protagon, around which unseemly controversy had raged.'[6] Tebb and Rosenheim married in July 1910.[7]
Mary received grants from the Royal Society to study cholesterol until 1916.[8]
In 1923, she worked at the Medical Research Council in Hampstead along with Rosenheim.[8] They studied spermine, having established the conditions for the reproduction of spermine phosphate crystals while at King's College.[9]
She died in 1953, being nursed by her husband for the last two years of her life.[10]