Edith Bülbring

Life and work

The story behind the role.

British pharmacologist (1903-1990).

Edith Bülbring, FRS (27 December 1903 – 5 July 1990) was a British scientist in the field of smooth muscle physiology, one of the first women accepted to the Royal Society as a fellow (FRS). She was professor of pharmacology in the Department of Pharmacology, University of Oxford (1967–71) and professorial fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, later emeritus professor (1971–1990). Born in Bonn, Germany, Bülbring was the daughter of Hortense Leonore and Karl Bülbring, a professor of English. She was educated in medicine at the University of Bonn, the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and the University of Freiburg, and became research assistant to the pharmacologist Ulrich Friedemann. When he and other Jewish colleagues were dismissed by the Nazis, she was initially overlooked, because she was only partly Jewish (her mother was Jewish), but eventually she was dismissed too. Together with her older sisters Luci and Maud, she travelled to England in 1933, where she joined the laboratory of Joshua Harold Burn at the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, University of London. When Burn was offered the post of professor of pharmacology at Oxford in 1938, she went with him. She remained as Burn's assistant until 1946, when she was appointed university demonstrator and lecturer, and began to conduct her own research independently. From 1950 until she retired in 1971 she led a flourishing research group exploring the physiology of smooth muscle, an area that had hitherto been neglected. She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1958.

Encyclopaedic excerpts from Edith Bülbring; shortened for length and available under CC BY-SA 4.0.