"Ruth Ella Moore" (May 19,1903-July 19,1994)

Mi.crobiologist born in Columbus Ohio,the youngest of William E. & Margaret Moore's
three children.Her daddy  worked as an electrician for a local manufacturing firm;all five members of the Moore family were listed as"mulattos"in the 1910 census. Ruth completed her entire education within Columbus,enrolling at Ohio State University for her BS (1926),MA (1927).PhD (1933);the latter two degrees were awarded in the field of microbiology.She taught both hygiene and English at Tennessee State College,a historically African-American college,to support herself during graduate school (1927-1930).Ruth was not only the first African-American woman received a PhD in the Natural Sciences.Her dissertation focused on the bacteriology of Mycobacterium tuberculosis,the organism that causes tuberculosis in humans.Tuberculosis posed a major threat to public health before effective antiibiotics were introduced against it in the 1940s;in 1900 nearly one out of every seven deaths in the United States was caused by tuberculosis.As one of the original disease-causing agents discovered by Robert Koch in the 1880s,the tuber-bacillus was an early target of public health initiatives aimed at limiting contagion.Massive Health campaigns were aimed to identify and treat people who had been infected,as a small army of microbiologists and bacteriologists turned their attention to every aspect of the bacillus's structure and behavior.Because of bacteriology's close connection to food science and home economics,a significant number of these bacteria-hunters were women.
Upon completion of her PhD in 1933,Ruth was offered a position at Howard University College of Medicine as an instructor of bacteriology.She remained at Howard in a variety of teaching and administrative positions for the rest of her career.In 1939 Ruth was named assistant professor of bacteriology;in 1948 she became acting head of Howard's department of bacteriology,preventive medicine,and public health.Ruth served as chair of the bacteriology department from 1955-1960,at which point she became an associate professor until her retirement in 1973.
Ruth arrived at Howard at a time when educational opportunities for African-Americans who wished to study medicine were severely limited.
In 1900,Howard was one of seven African-American medical colleges;by 1915,in the aftermath of reforms proposed by the American Medical Association's Flexner Report in 1910,only Howard & Meharry Medical College in Nashville,Tennessee,remained.With few exceptions,only Howard & Meharry educated African-American physicians in the United States until the 1960s.
The university's affiliated teaching facility,the Freedman's Hospital,that accepted African-American interns and residents.
Imortantly for Ruth,in 1941 the hospital opened a special facility dedicated to treating
tuberculosis patients.
As the first woman to chair a medical department at Howard University,Ruth opened doors for a new generation of women entering medical school in the 1960s.While
most African-American women studying the health sciences until the 1970s planned on careers in nursing,at the beginning of the twenty-first century women made up almost 40 percent of medical students at Howard University.Ruth led at a time when few women,African-American or white,were offered leadership positions within colleges and universities;her leadership at Howard is particulary notable given the company she kept.Dr.Charles Richard Drew,the inventor of the blood bank,served as the head of the department of surgery from 1941 until until his death in 1950;the
department of anatomy was chaired from 1947-1969 by Dr.William Montague Cobb,a prominent civil rights leader who served as president of the NAACP and the National Medical Association,the black medical society.After her  retirement in in 1973,Ruth remained in the American Public Health Association,the American Association Society of Microbiology.She was also a member of the National Council of Churches and the Augustana Luteran Church in Washington, D.C. Ruth died from heart failure at the National Lutheran Home for the aged in Rockville,Maryland.