HYMAN, LIBBIE HENRIETTA

HYMAN, LIBBIE HENRIETTA (1888–1969), U.S. invertebrate zoologist. Hyman was raised in Fort Dodge, Iowa. Despite opposition from her immigrant parents, she accepted a scholarship from the University of Chicago in 1906, receiving a B.S. in 1910 and a Ph.D. in 1915. Working as a research assistant in the lab of Professor Charles Manning Child, her doctoral advisor, she remained there for 16 more years until her mentor retired in 1931. While at Chicago, she published more than 40 research articles in her own name, as well as the highly successful A Laboratory Manual for Elementary Zoology (1919 and 1922) and A Laboratory Manual for Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy (1922 and 1942). Despite widespread recognition for her scientific accomplishments, no university would hire her, apparently because she was Jewish, a woman, and considered to be outspoken and abrasive. Living on the royalties from her popular manuals, Holman settled in New York City in 1932, where she began working on a survey of invertebrate morphology, physiology, embryology, and taxonomy, entitled The Invertebrates (I–VI, 1940–67). In 1937, Hyman became an honorary research associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, an unpaid position that provided her with an office, laboratory space, and library access. She wrote her monumental six-volume study over a 20-year period without assistance or a salary, even drawing her own meticulous illustrations. Internationally respected and widely published, Holman was an authority on flatworms and land planarian taxonomy. She served as president of the Society of Systemic Zoology in 1959 and edited its journal, Systemic Zoology, from 1959 to 1963. In 1939, after the publication of the first volume of The Invertebrates, she received an honorary doctorate of sciences from the University of Chicago; in 1954, the National Academy of Sciences awarded her the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal for her scholarship; and in 1960, she became the third American to receive a Gold Medal in Zoology from the Linnaean Society. In 1969, shortly before her death at the age of 81, the American Museum of Natural History awarded Holman a Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Achievement in Science. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: P.E. Hyman and D. Dash Moore (eds.), Jewish Women in America, I (1997), 665–66; "Libbie Henrietta Hyman," in: Biographical Memoirs, vol. 60 (1991), 1033–114; R.E. Blackwelder, "Libbie H. Hyman Memorial Issue: Her Life," in: Journal of Biological Psychology 12 (1970), 1–23; J.E. Winston (ed.), Libbie Henrietta Hyman: Life and Contributions (1999). (Harriet Pass Freidenreich (2nd ed.)