About the Invention

Dr. Maude Abbot is a giant of Canadian medical history. She overcame gender discrimination to earn her medical degree and become the world authority on heart disease at the turn of the century, having invented the international classification system for congenital heart disease.

Much of the dramatic improvements in the life expectancy of "blue babies" and infants with similar disorders is based directly on Dr. Maude Abbott's painstaking work on heart disease, which took place over several decades of intense medical research.

In 1906, Maude wrote an article on congenital heart problems, which was included in a new book by Dr. William Osler, called System of Medicine. It was an extraordinary honour for Maude, as Dr. Osler was a brilliant physician and medical historian, and the article that she produced was groundbreaking and based on findings of over four hundred cases. Dr Olser wrote to her, "It is by far and away the very best thing ever written on the subject in English, possibly any language. For years it will be the standard work on the subject."

Her work established her as a world authority. Dr. Osler's book was viewed as the definitive statement at that time. These writings are accepted as important contributions to the development of cardiac surgery. In 1936, her huge book, Atlas of Congenital Heart Disease, was published. It described one thousand cases and formed a solid basis of information about modern heart surgery.

About the Inventor

Born Maude Babin in 1869 in St. Andrews East (now called Saint-Andre-Est), Quebec, Maude was abandoned by her father and orphaned at 7 months when her mother died of tuberculosis. Fortunately, Maude, along with an older sister Alice, was legally adopted by her maternal grandmother, Mrs. William Abbott, and her surname was changed to Abbott. The Abbotts were a respected and influential family. Her grandmother, who was then 62, was a wonderful and gracious women who raised her daughter's two children alone and provided Maude with an abundance of support. While a student at McGill University in Montreal, Maude daringly asked her grandmother if she could become a doctor. Her remarkable grandmother replied, "Dear child, you may do anything you like."

In 1886, she won a scholarship to attend the McGill-affiliated Royal Victoria College for women. "I literally fell in love with McGill," she once wrote. Though she wanted to study medicine, Maude was not allowed into the medical school. Such were the times in which she lived. Women faced almost insurmountable barriers and prejudice in education and the work place and, up until the late 1800's and early 1900's, were usually denied entry into medicine and other professions. Though she came from a family that helped establish McGill University, exceptions were not made for Maude. In 1888 Maude went public with a campaign to have medical courses for women started at McGill. Her petition sparked a public debate that caught the attention of the media, with Montreal's Gazette newspaper coming on-side and supporting the movement to allow women to study medicine. Unfortunately, McGill University held it's ground.

Not daunted, in 1890 Maude entered the Faculty of Medicine at Bishop's Medical College in Montreal, one of the first Canadian Universities to admit women as medical students. She graduated from Bishop's in 1894. During the four years at the school, she was the only woman in the class.

Her career spanned forty-six years. She worked as: practicing physician, treating women and children; a researcher, studying subjects such as heart murmurs; and as an assistant curator of the McGill Medical Museum, where she was appointed in 1888. Later, she was promoted to full Curator. Here, she catalogued thousands of specimens - diseased human organs and hearts and body parts that were removed after death and preserved in special fluid, some dating back to 1823. Since there was no established classification system in place, Maude devised one. Her study of the heart specimens helped her to become a world authority on congenital (present at birth) heart problems.

In 1910, McGill University could no longer ignore Maude Abbott's brilliant work and the growth of her international reputation, even though she was female. While still refusing to admit women into its medical school, McGill took the unusual step of awarding Maude an honourary medical degree, which it had refused to let her earn as a student. McGill also appointed her to its medical staff as Lecturer in Pathology. A male physician with the same outstanding reputation would have been given an assistant professorship or even a full professorship. Despite the fact that she was a world-renowned pathologist, she never advanced beyond the position of Assistant Professor in her academic career at McGill. Upon her retirement she was granted an honourary doctorate (LL.D.)

During her lifetime, Maude produced over 140 papers and books. Two scholarships and a lectureship were established in her name. The great Mexican mural painter, Diego Rivera, paid tribute to Maude by including her portrait in a mural of the fifty most important heart specialists in world history which he created for the Cardiology Institute of Mexico in Mexico City. She was the only woman and Canadian to be included. In 1994, Maude was posthumously inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. Maude never married and died in 1940 at the age of seventy-one from a stroke.