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Dr. Jane Hinton: helped develop the Hueller-Hinton agar medium and was one of the first African-American female veterinarians.
Born May 1, 1919, in Canton, Massachusetts, Dr. Jane Hinton made history by helping develop an agar medium used to test bacterial resistance to antibiotics, as well as becoming one of the first African-American female vets. When she was six years old, her parents sent her and her sister to Europe so that they could receive the best education possible for black students at the time. She returned to the U.S. two years later and graduated from high school in 1935. Dr. Hinton then attended Simmons College in Boston and earned her bachelor's degree in 1939.
After graduation, Dr. Hinton worked in her father's laboratory at Harvard University's Department of Bacteriology and Immunology as an assistant to John Howard Mueller. During her time there, she helped develop Mueller-Hinton agar. Mueller-Hinton agar is a culture medium in which bacteria can survive. It is a standard in antibiotic testing. From 1942–1945, Dr. Jane Hinton worked as a medical technician in Arizona for the U.S. War Department. It wasn't until after World War II that Jane decided she wanted to be a veterinarian. She received her DVM from the University of Pennsylvania's Veterinary School in 1949 (the same year Alfreda Johnson Webb became a vet at Tuskegee University; the two of them became the first Black, female veterinarians in the nation). During her time at the University of Pennsylvania, she was the class historian for one year and the class secretary for three. After graduating, she worked as a small animal veterinarian in Canton, Massachusetts (her hometown), until 1955. That year, she began working for the Department of Agriculture as an inspector in Framingham, Massachusetts. There, she researched and responded to outbreaks among livestock. She retired in 1960, when she was only 41 years old, and spent most of her time tending to her garden and taking care of her pets. She passed away on April 9, 2003.
Dr. Patricia O'Connor was born on November 29, 1914, in New York City. Despite this, she was raised in Buffalo, New York, surrounded by animals. She would often play doctor with her cats and dogs. She graduated from the University of Alabama in 1935; it was there that she fulfilled all of her veterinary school prerequisites. When the Great Depression hit, Dr. O'Connor was worried about not being able to afford higher education. However, after a deceased relative left her $16,000, she enrolled at Cornell University's veterinary school in 1935. She worked very hard at school and was often teased by the boys around her for it. She countered their comments by teasing them and making remarks about how they don't work hard enough and didn't come to class well-dressed.
Patricia O'Connor was one of only three women to graduate from Cornell in 1939 and worked at a small animal practice in Charleston, West Virginia. In 1940, Patricia married one of her college classmates, Dr. John Halloran Jr.; she kept Patricia O'Connor as her professional name. John Jr.'s father owned a general practice in Staten Island, NYC, and so the couple was off to work in the city. While there, John Jr. was assigned to the work on the large animals (at the time, cattle were common on Staten Island), and Patricia was assigned to the small animals at the clinic and house calls. O'Connor's father-in-law paid her husband well; however, Patricia was not paid at all for her work in the clinic nor for the miles she had to put on her car to perform house calls. Though she enjoyed her job, when the Staten Island Zoo offered her a paying job, she was quick to jump on the opportunity.
In the fall of 1942, Patricia was pregnant with her second child and was ready to start her job at the city-owned zoo as the chief caretaker and veterinarian. She was responsible for over 600 animals! Dr. O'Connor worried that once WWII ended and the male veterinarians returned home, she would be laid off. The opposite was true, however, and she remained at the zoo for 28 years! To this day, her career at the zoo is considered iconic. Patricia loved that every day at the zoo she brought something different and new, from removing an infected lion tooth to wrestling uncooperative badgers to laughing at the chimpanzees that inspected her equipment and searched for the medicine they liked to eat. She developed deep connections with a lot of the animals, including Jitterbug Jessie, a spider monkey that loved Patricia so much that she would hug her when Patricia entered her habitat. She kept detailed case reports on each animal and spent a lot of her free time researching possible diagnoses and treatment plans. She also curated specific daily diets for each species. She was extremely dedicated to her work and wanted to better each animal she dealt with. She did so by thoroughly researching animals and the issues they faced. She would perform autopsies on the animals that passed to understand the complications the animal faced so that if the same problem occurred again, she could treat it. She even developed a serum that prevented the mouth rot that was killing a lot of snakes at the zoo. Dr. O'Connor believed that working with animals was better than working with humans because they didn't feel sorry for themselves and were better behaved. While at the zoo, "the doc," as she was known, not only dealt with the medical care the animals needed but also developed educational programs and built up bird and mammal communities within the zoo. She traveled a lot for both domestic and international meetings, developing close connections with public health officials in the greater New York area. One of her many accomplishments includes an extensive bibliography she compiled of diseases of wild birds and mammals. This compilation was published by the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) in 1955. In 1946, at the annual meeting of the AVMA, Patricia met with three other zoo vets and decided to formalize their sharing of practices and promotion of the field by founding the North American Zoo Veterinarians Organization. Patricia served as the chair, secretary, and only officer from 1946 to 1957. In 1960, the group adopted bylaws and officially became the American Association of Zoo Veterinarians (AAZV); this group still exists.
She retired from the zoo in 1966 after her husband passed away. She then returned to the small practice where he operated and became known as the "little old veterinarian lady on Broad Street." In 1999, she retired from veterinary medicine for good and moved to Indiana to be closer to her family. She passed away on July 8, 2003.