Mabel Purefoy FitzGerald

Mabel Purefoy FitzGerald (3 August 1872 – 24 August 1973) was a British physiologist and clinical pathologist best known for her work on the physiology of respiration. She became the second female member of the American Physiological Society in 1913.

Mabel FitzGerald was born in 1872 in Preston Candover near Basingstoke. She was educated at home, as was typical for upper and middle class girls in her time. In 1895, both her parents died and Mabel moved to Oxford with her sisters in 1896. She began to teach herself chemistry and biology from books, as well as attending classes at Oxford University between 1896 and 1899, even though women were not yet allowed to receive degrees. She continued her studies at the University of Copenhagen, Cambridge University and New York University.

FitzGerald began to work with Francis Gotch at the physiology department in Oxford. Gotch also helped her get a paper published by the Royal Society in 1906.

From 1904, FitzGerald worked with John Scott Haldane on measuring the carbon dioxide tension in the human lung. After studying the differences between healthy and ill people, the two continued to investigate the effects of altitude on respiration; it is this work that they are most famous for. FitzGerald's observations of the effects of full altitude acclimatization on carbon dioxide tension and haemoglobin remain accepted today.

In 1907, FitzGerald was awarded a Rockefeller travelling scholarship, which allowed her to work in New York and Toronto.

In 1911 she participated, along with C. Gordon Douglas and several other scientists, in a Colorado expedition led by John Scott Haldane to investigate human respiration at high altitudes.

In the summer of 1913 in North Carolina, she made measurements on the breathing and the blood of a total of 43 adult residents chosen from three different locations in the Southern Appalachian chain.

FitzGerald returned to the UK in 1915 to serve as a clinical pathologist at the Edinburgh infirmary, a position that was empty because of World War I. She did not publish any more papers and remained out of contact with the physiology community even after her return to Oxford in 1930.

In 1961, on the centenary of Haldane's birth, her work was rediscovered. In 1972, at 100 years old, she received an honorary MA from Oxford University, 75 years after she had attended classes there. She was also made a member of The Physiological Society.

After her death R. W. Torrance was asked to look at her scientific apparatus and papers in the house at 12 Crick Road. ... The apparatus formed the tools of her trade as a physiologist studying acclimatizations at high altitude, including an altimeter, haemoglobinometer, haemocytometer, and the two hemi-Haldane apparatuses she had used in North Carolina. There was a trunk full of family diaries including her own and many letters including some about scientific work from Haldane, Douglas, Gotch, Mann, Henderson and Sherrington. This material is now in the Bodleian Library. There was also correspondence with Osler for whom she collected medical books.

• FitzGerald, MP; Haldane, JS (1905). "The normal alveolar carbonic acid pressure in man" (PDF). The Journal of Physiology. 32 (5–6): 486–494. doi:10.1113/jphysiol.1905.sp001095. PMC 1465735. PMID 16992788. 
• FitzGerald, MP (1913). "The changes in the breathing and the blood at various high altitudes" (PDF). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Containing Papers of a Biological Character. 203 (294–302): 351–371. doi:10.1098/rstb.1913.0008. 
• FitzGerald, MP (1914). "Further observations on the changes in the breathing and the blood at various high altitudes" (PDF). Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Containing Papers of a Biological Character. 88 (602): 248–258. Bibcode:1914RSPSB..88..248P. doi:10.1098/rspb.1914.0072.