Blue plaque unveiled in Oxford to celebrate Florence Buchanan

The Physiological Society was delighted to unveil a blue plaque to celebrate the legacy of Dr Florence Buchanan (1867 -1931). Dr Buchanan was the first woman to attend a meeting of The Physiological Society in 1896.

The plaque is positioned at The Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics at University of Oxford, UK where Buchanan worked as a research assistant with John Burdon-Sanderson on the electrical responses of muscle.

When Burdon-Sanderson left University of Oxford in 1904, Dr Buchanan moved to the University Museum of Natural History, where she set up her own lab funded by grants from The Royal Society. She was especially interested in the frequency of the heart rate, and how it varied in different species, in hibernating animals and during exercise. Among her many contributions, she provided data for August Krogh, who wrote “Miss Buchanan has shown us the very great kindness to take some electrocardiograms on subjects starting work on a stationary tricycle”. One of her subjects was the famous Oxford respiratory physiologist CG Douglas, who apparently was ‘not at all heated’ by the exercise. Unfortunately, despite providing data, Dr Buchanan does not appear as an author on the paper, something that would certainly happen now.

Dr Buchanan was the first woman to attend a meeting of The Physiological Society in 1896. In 1912, after she had been going to meetings of The Society for 16 years, John Scott Haldane proposed her for membership, making her the first woman proposed to become a member of The Physiological Society. She received 50 signatures of support from renowned scientists. Despite some significant opposition, a membership ballot resulted in overwhelming support for women and in July 1915 the first 6 women were admitted, Dr Buchanan being one of them. By then, she had given at least 10 communications to The Society, published 2 papers in The Journal of Physiology and 3 in what is now called Experimental Physiology.