Ida Henrietta Hyde (September 8, 1857 – August 22, 1945) was an Americanphysiologist known for developing a micro-electrode powerful enough to stimulate tissue chemically or electronically, yet small enough to inject or remove tissue from a cell. Ida was never married and agnostic in her religious standing. She retired at the age in 63 in the year 1920. After her retirement, Ida traveled to several places, including Switzerland, Austria, Egypt, India, and several locations in Germany. On August 22, 1945 Ida Hyde died of a cerebral hemorrhage.^[1] Ida Hyde is the great-aunt of biochemist Arthur Pardee.

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Childhood[edit]

Born in Davenport, Iowa, Ida was one of four children to Meyer and Babette (Lowenthal) Heidenheimer, Germanimmigrants from Württemberg. The surname Hyde was taken after their arrival in the United States. Ida's father was a merchant that worked out of home and who left the family on one of his trips, leaving Babette to care for the children. In order to keep the family afloat, they moved to Chicago, where Babette took in jobs of cleaning and mending until she was able to start a prosperous business. All of the children were able and sent to public school and became educated middle class individuals, with the intention of Ida's only brother Ben, to attend university.^[2]

Ida Summers Biography Jane

In 1871, the family home was destroyed in the Great Fire of Chicago, which destroyed the family business as well. Without any form of income, Ida as the oldest daughter, entered the work force at age 14 as a milliner'sapprentice. Because of her age, older than that of her siblings, much of the burden of supporting the family fell on her. She brought in a large portion of the family income, and even paid for her only brother's education at the University of Illinois. Over time, she rose in her occupation to the job of saleslady. Her experience in the clothing store proved to be valuable later in life because of her ability to fashion her own clothing with minimal supplies.^[2]

Education[edit]

At the store where she worked, Hyde chanced upon an English version of Ansichten der Natur (View of Nature) by Alexander von Humboldt. It was from this work that her love of biology was born. In addition, it spurred her toward continuing her education, which she did by attending night classes at the Chicago Athenaeum during 1875–76 in spite of her parent's objections. Her further educational studies came to her while she was visiting her brother at his university and chanced upon meeting several women working in academia. She was able to pass her entrance exams for the College Preparatory School and later entered the same university as her brother.

Ida began studying at the University of Illinois at the age of 24, but her study was cut short when her brother became sick in 1882 and she had to attend to him. She also used all of her savings for just one year of education. However, she passed the county teacher's exam and, three years later, the Chicago teacher's exams, and for the next seven years she worked as a teacher of second- and third-graders within the Chicago public school system. Her biological pursuits were still expressed in her attempts to work nature studies into the public school system. She saved money to put towards her tuition, remaining focused on her goal of attaining a college degree.^[3]

In 1888 she was finally able to return to the collegiate scene at the age of 31. She enrolled at Cornell University and earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in just three years. She was then offered a biology scholarship at Bryn Mawr College. She accepted and began under the tutelage of Jacques Loeb and Thomas Hunt Morgan.^[2] As an assistant att Woods Hole Biological Laboratory, she conducted research on the nervous system of jellyfish. She produced many detailed drawings and descriptions of the nerve cells. In 1893, Hyde received a European Fellowship from the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, which would later become the American Association of University Women.

Ida's results from the research at Woods Hole is said to have helped motivate Dr. Goette in inviting her to come to University of Strasbourg in 1893, to work with him even as no woman had done previously. Hyde, during her attendance at Strasbourg, was the first woman in Germany to have ever petitioned to matriculate for an advanced degree in natural science or mathematics. At the time it was necessary to petition the government and get permission from the faculty. Before this process went fully into motion Ida withdrew her attempts. It is said that the large number of people who spoke out against Ida going through with the petition is what was the cause of that decision, and that Heidelberg University would be a better place to gain her degree.

Ida received her Ph.D. at Heidelberg University, Germany at age 39 after many frustrating obstacles presented because of her gender. She was not allowed to attend some lectures, and had to read the notes of male students.^[4] She was required to go beyond the work of an average student to receive her degree, and became the third woman to graduate with a doctorate there. The main problem in obtaining her degree was that her teaching professor, Wilhelm Kühne, disliked the thought of allowing a woman to work under him. But her accomplishments eventually surmounted his opposition and she passed the doctoral examinations with honor in February 1896 and became the first woman to receive a doctorate from this institution.^[5] Her thesis project examined the physiological development of jellyfish (Hydromedusa).

Ida researched at several other institutions before going to the University of Kansas including University of Berne 1896, and Radcliffe College 1897. After she started working at KU, Hyde also studied at Rush Medical College over several summers to receive her M. D. in 1911.^[6]

Career[edit]

In the course of Ida's seven years of teaching she was involved in establishing the “Science in the Schools” program in Chicago's public school system. This program helped to introduce nature studies into these school, where Ida was even known for sharing her own teaching methods with the other educators.

Following completion of her doctorate, she was invited to Naples, Italy as the Investigator of Residence at the Naples Zoological Station, a prestigious post. She continued work on marine invertebrate physiology, until moving to the University of Bern, Switzerland to work with Dr. Kronecker on muscle physiology. She became the first woman admitted to do research at Harvard Medical School under W.T. Porter. While continuing her research, she also furthered her education and medical training at Harvard. Hyde remained an educator as well, teaching classes at preparatory schools and at Woods Hole during the summer.

She was hired as an Associate Professor by the University of Kansas in 1899 and founded the Department of Physiology, also serving as its first Chairman of the Department of Physiology, where she worked for 22 years.^[7]

Ida Summers Biography Wikipedia

Over her career, Hyde's research covered the nervous, circulatory, and she respiratory systems of vertebrates and invertebrates, and explored the effects of narcotics, caffeine, and alcohol on the body. Also in through the course of her work she noted the differences in the effects of music on the cardiovascular system in athletes, musicians, and farmers and caffeine being the cause of decreased efficiency in physical work. She was the first women elected into the American Society of Physiologists in 1902, and was its only female member until 1913.^[8]

Microelectrode[edit]

Hyde was a researcher and professor, but also an inventor and innovator. She developed instruments for monitoring physiological parameters in a marine animal that could be used in seawater. Her most well-known invention was an intracellular micropipette electrode. Dr. Hyde had observed that electrolytes in high concentrations affect processes of cell division, leading to her noting of the minute differences in electrical potential within cells. In order to understand how these nerve and muscle cells work, she needed to be able to stimulate the cells properly and be able to record the results of the change in the currents of the individual cells occurring. Ida's microelectrode can be used for stimulating cells at the micro level while recording electrical activity within the cell without disturbing the cellular wall. This device was a revolutionary invention in neurophysiology and the study of contractile nerve tissue, however, the micro electrode was never officially attributed to Ida as being its first inventor.^[3][5]

Though Dr. Hyde's possible microelectrode invention was reported in 1921, several others also created electrodes similar to Ida's, while scientific historians, like G. Kass-Simon have accredited Hyde's invention as being the original and revolutionary. Another microelectrode was supposedly invented another time, about twenty years after Ida was said to have made her version of this invention, by Judith Graham and Ralph W. Gerard from the University of Chicago. Then in the 1950s, Gerard was nominated for a Nobel Prize, because of his developed model of the microelectrode.^[9]

Selected publications[edit]

• Notes on the Hearts of Certain Mammals. The American Naturalist 25(298) 1891. pp. 861–863. JSTOR2451734
• The Nervous System in Goneomea Murbachii. Biological Bulletin 4(1) 1902. pp. 40–45. JSTOR1535511
• The Kaiser and the Devilfish. The New York Evening Post Magazine, May 25, 1918.
• A micro-electrode and unicellular stimulation. Biol. Bull. 40:130–133, 1921.
• Effects of music upon electrocardiograms and blood pressure. J. Exp. Psychol. 7:213–224 1924.

Human health contributions[edit]

Ida Hyde lectured on multiple occasions within and outside of the University of Kansas. With the aid of area physicians, she established a program of public medical examination of school children for communicable diseases such as tuberculosis and spinal meningitis. Though she was not a true medical professional, she was elected to membership in the Kansas Medical Society because of her expertise in the knowledge and control of infectious diseases. And in 1918 she was appointed State Chairman of the Kansas Women's Committee on Health, Sanitation and National Defense. A notable proportion of the lectures Ida held in her career were on hygiene and spreadable diseases. Dr. Hyde spoke openly about human sexuality and its involvement in the spread of disease, as well as being an open promoter of public health education.^[8]

Anti-discrimination efforts[edit]

It was not until I had worked many days in the splendid laboratory assigned to my private use that it dawned upon me that I was occupying a unique position... In the university circle the news quickly spread that an American 'woman's rights' freak... had had the boldness and audacity to force entrance into the college halls. — Ida H. Hyde, 'Before Women Were Human Beings'.^[10]

Ida Summers Biography Books

Hyde repeatedly encountered barriers to her education and career due to her gender, and pressed for more equal access and treatment of women in academia throughout her life. When she was denied the right to enroll in Strassburg University because of her gender, she went to Heidelberg University. Although she was allowed to matriculate, the university's medical school did not permit women, and the faculty denied her entry to physiology lectures or laboratories. Fortunately, her male colleagues shared their lecture notes, and after intense study she passed her doctoral examinations with honor.^[11] She wrote about her difficulties in a revealing account in the AAUW Journal entitled 'Before Women Were Human Beings'.^[10]

After returning to America, Hyde enlisted the help of many fellow women academics and wealthy female benefactors to create a fund to support women in science. The Naples Table Association became a source of both financial aid and professional support for women in scientific research, with 36 women benefiting from the program.^[11] In 1927, she established a scholarship at the University of Kansas (KU) for women pursuing careers in the sciences, and endowed the Ida H. Hyde International Fellowship with the Association of American University Women (AAUW).^[12] On the campus of KU, she pushed for toilet facilities in the science buildings; these buildings were built with only restrooms provided for men, assuming there would be no need for women's facilities. She repeatedly pressed the university for equal pay and worked in the community to increase the opportunities for women in diverse professions.

References[edit]

1. ^Rose, Rose (1997). Women in the biological sciences: a biobibliographic sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 248.
2. ^ ^abcRose, Rose (1997). Women in the biological sciences: a biobibliographic sourcebook. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 246. ISBN0-313-29180-2. Retrieved 2009-04-26. Ida Henrietta Hyde.
3. ^ ^abButin, Jan. 'Ida Henrietta Hyde (1857–1945)' Encyclopedia, Jewish Women's Archive, accessed March 6, 2015.
4. ^'Physiology's Hidden Genius' by Lisa Scanlon. Trailing Edge column, Technology Review, May 2003, p. 80.
5. ^ ^abJohnson, Elsie (1981). 'Ida Henrietta Hyde: Early Experiments'(PDF). Physiologist. 24 (6): 1–2. PMID7043502. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2011-05-23. Retrieved 2009-04-26.
6. ^Wayne, Tiffany K. (2011). American Women of Science since 1900. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. pp. 536–537. ISBN978-1-59884-158-9.
7. ^Tucker, Gail S. (1981). 'Ida Henrietta Hyde: The First Woman Member of the Society'. 24(6) pp. 1–9
8. ^ ^abTucker, G. S. (December 1, 1981). 'Ida Henrietta Hyde: The First Woman Member of the Society'(PDF). The Physiologist. 24 (6): 10–11. PMID7043503. Archived from the original(PDF) on January 22, 2017.
9. ^Benson, Alvin K. (2010). Inventors and Inventions. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, Incorporated. pp. 578–579. ISBN978-1-58765-522-7.
10. ^ ^abHyde, Ida H (1938). 'Before Women Were Human Beings... Adventures of an American Fellow in German Universities of the '90's'. AAUW Journal. 31 (4): 226–236.
11. ^ ^abSloan, Jan Butin (1978) The Foundation of the Naples Table Association for Promoting Scientific Research by Women, 1897. Signs, 4(1) 208–216. University of Chicago Press. JSTOR3173357
12. ^Emily Taylor Center for Women & Gender Equity, The University of Kansas. http://emilytaylorcenter.ku.edu/pioneer-woman/hyde accessed March 6, 2015

External links[edit]

• Tucker, Gail (1981). 'Ida Henrietta Hyde: The First Woman Member of the Society'(PDF). Physiologist. 24 (6): 1–9. PMID7043502. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2011-06-09. Retrieved 2009-04-26.
• Hyde, Ida (1905). Outlines of Experimental Physiology. Harvard University. Retrieved 2009-04-26.
• Marcus, Jacob (1996). The Jew in the American world: a sourcebook. Wayne State University Press. p. 211. ISBN0-8143-2548-3. Retrieved 2009-04-26.

“Did you ever see someone who was killed in the war but who is still alive?” With this trenchant remark, the central character of Ida Fink’s short story “Cheerful Zophia” encapsulates the after-effect of the Holocaust on the author’s own life. As a child, Zophia survived the war in solitude and silence, hiding in a barn and scavenging for food under cover of darkness at night. Years later, a solitary adult, she lives in studied self-sufficiency and with a discordant cheerfulness that she understands is a “symptom,” presumably of trauma.

Zophia’s caustic question pertains to many of the characters that populate the world of Fink’s fiction and drama—survivors struggling with memory, radical bereavement, and the aftershock of atrocity. In a very different sense, the question might be applied to Fink’s oeuvre as a whole, which, through memory and imagination, resurrects victims, survivors and perpetrators of the Nazi genocide. Her writing gives shape to the inner lives of victims and human faces to their experiences, while exposing the callousness of onlookers and the complicated motives even of rescuers.

Ida Landau was born in 1921 in Zbarazh (Poland; today a town in W. Ukraine) to Ludwig and Fannie/Francisca (Stein) Landau. Theirs was a family of secular Jews, well integrated into Polish culture. Her father was a physician and her mother had a doctorate in natural sciences. Part of the Polish intelligentsia, they had a strong sense of identity as Jews, and numbered both Jews and non-Jews in their social sphere. Fink’s younger sister, Elsa, was born in 1922. The family spoke Polish and German at home, rather than Yiddish.

By the time Ida Landau began her studies in gymnasium, the fascist presence in Poland could already be felt. She frequently heard antisemitic remarks, and understood that the changing political climate would radically circumscribe her education and professional aspirations. Interested in literature and music at the university level, she prepared for a career as a pianist by studying at the Lvov Conservatory, but the German invasion of Poland in September, 1939, when Landau was eighteen years old, terminated her studies. In 1941, her mother died of cancer at the age of fifty.

Ida Landau was confined to the Zbarazh ghetto with her family until 1942, when she and her younger sister acquired false identity papers. A fair haired, blue-eyed young woman, Landau did not look identifiably Jewish. The two sisters survived the war in hiding by concealing their identities. A fictionalized account of the war years appears in her novel The Journey.

In 1948 Ida married Bruno (Bronek) Fink, a survivor of four camps. Born in 1905, he was an engineer whose entire family —parents, wife, son, brother, nephew—perished in the Nazi genocide. For a number of years Ida and Bruno Fink remained in Poland, where Fink gave birth to a daughter, Miri, in 1952. In 1957, the family—including Fink’s father, who died in 1964—moved to Israel and settled in Holon. At the age of thirty-six, Ida Fink began to learn the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. She remained close with her sister, Elsa Neuhaus, who became a nurse and lived nearby. Bruno died in 1983. Fink has two grandchildren, Yoav and Mayan.

Although Fink recollects that, while in hiding, she felt a determination to write about her experiences, more than a decade passed before she began to do so. In the late 1950s she began composing short stories based on memories and on stories told to her. Rooted in actual experiences, in Fink’s talented hands the stories took shape as highly crafted, powerful narratives that reveal the daily details of life and death under the threat of genocide, as well as the interplay of memory, bereavement and trauma, years later. Fink has explained that she chose the genre of fiction rather than autobiographical or historical narrative partly to protect the privacy of the lives revealed, and partly to assume the artistic freedom she felt necessary to speak the unspeakable.

Fink’s earliest attempts to publish her stories were discouraging. Editors criticized her writing as too subdued and subtle, not dramatic enough for Holocaust writing. Despite this, she made no attempt to alter her style. Eventually her work was published to glowing reviews. Her first collection of stories was published in Polish in 1983, followed in 1989 by the publication of the English translation, A Scrap of Time and Other Stories. Her novel The Journey was published in English translation in 1992, after its initial appearance in Polish in 1990. A film version of the novel was produced for German television in 2002. A third volume, Traces, containing stories and short plays in English translation, appeared in 1997. Fink’s writing has garnered many prestigious international awards, including the first Anne Frank Prize for Literature (1985), the Yad Vashem Prize (1995), the Moravia Prize (1996), the PEN Club Prize (Poland, 2003) and an honorary doctorate from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2004. In addition to Hebrew and English, her work has been translated into many languages, including German, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, and French. The first collection of her stories in Hebrew translation was published in 2004.

Like the title of her first collection, many of Fink’s works are “scraps of time,” revealing slivers of detail and experience that speak to a complex whole. Many of her works isolate moments of realization—of the radical and irretrievable change brought by Nazism, or of the certainty of one’s death. In “The Garden That Floated Away,” for example, the narrator hallucinates that her family’s yard is drifting off into the air. That surreal image symbolizes the end of normal life for Jews, and the difference between what awaits the narrator’s family and her non-Jewish friends and neighbors. Similarly, in “The Threshold,” a Jewish teenager finds she can no longer deny the reality her elders have spoken of. “A Spring Morning” follows the last hours of a young father who awakens to the sounds of approaching trucks, and realizes appallingly “that he had overslept his life.”

Many of Fink’s narratives focus on intimate moments, revealing the ways in which atrocity insinuates itself into the most private of relationships, such as those between parents and children, siblings, or spouses. Her stories reveal the preternatural maturity of children called upon to protect their parents (for example, “Traces” and “The Key Game”), the horrible regrets of parents who cannot save their children despite their best effort (“A Spring Morning,” “Crazy,” and “Description of a Morning”), the guilt of children who survive thanks to their parents protective agency (“Splinter”), the shifting dynamics of sisters shaped by how “Jewish” each looks (The Journey), and other close relationships marked by the encounter with Nazism.

A recurrent theme is that of youth cut short. Many of Fink’s works feature young people who are old enough to understand that they have been horribly cheated. No longer children but not yet adults, consciousness of what awaits them, they include a student who laments that she will die without knowing love (“An Afternoon on the Grass”), a girl who worries that she will not live to complete the romance novel she is reading (“Jean Christophe”), a teenager who barters her virginity for a false document she hopes will save her and her mother (“Aryan Papers”), a couple who attempt to find a moment’s joy before they are killed (“Behind the Hedge”).

Fink also explores a range of behaviors and attitudes of those not under direct threat of death. Her work exposes the indifference of eye witnesses, the complicated relationships between Jews and those with the power to assist or condemn them, and the antisemitism that survived the war (“Conversation,” “Shelter,” “A Spring Morning,” The Journey).

In all of Fink’s work, the seemingly insignificant detail opens up a profound look at complexities of experience, memory, and motivation. As Fink excavates what she terms “the ruins of memory,” she brings to the forefront the act of memory itself, and the complicated relationship linking memory, imagination, and language. Fragments of the past that resurface in the present, Fink’s writing offers an unflinching and insightful look at wartime experiences and memories. By turns poignant and tender, grim and sardonic, Fink’s lean and unsentimental prose conveys the profound and lasting effects of the Holocaust.

Fink passed away on September 27, 2011 at the age of 89.

SELECTED WORKS BY IDA FINK

A Scrap of Time: Stories. Trans. Madeline Levine and Francine Prose. New York: 1987;

The Journey. Trans. Joanna Weschler and Francine Prose. New York: 1992;

Traces: Stories. Trans. Phillip Boehm and Francine Prose. New York: 1997;

Collected Works (Hebrew). Tel Aviv: 2004.

Eberstadt, Fernanda. “Images of an Extinguished World.” Review of Traces. New York Times August 24, 1997:12.

Horowitz, Sara R. Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction. New York: 1997.

Kaplan, Johanna. Review of A Scrap of Time. New York Times Book Review July 12, 1987: 7.

Ida Summers

Mitgang, Herbert. “Words as a Shield Against the Nazis.” Review of The Journey. New York Times August 19, 1992:18.

Pilling, Jayne. Review of A Scrap of Time. Times Literary Supplement August 26, 1988: 928.

Ida Summers Biography Photos

Shaked, Gershon. The Name of the Game: Survival (Hebrew). Yedi’ot Aharonot August 6, 1993: 26.

Shaked, Gershon. Playing in the Theater of the Absurd. Yedi’ot Aharonot August 13, 1993: 31.

Wilczynski, Marek. “Trusting the Words: Paradoxes of Ida Fink.” Modern Language Studies 24/4 (Fall 1994): 25–38.

Interviews

“Zawsze chcialam pisac” (“I've Always Wanted to Write'). An interview with Ida Fink by Katarzyna Bielas, Gazeta Wyborcza 160(July 12, 1994): 11.

“Fantasy is Harmful.” Interview with Ida Fink by Eva Hoffman. New York Times Book Review July 12, 1987: 9.

Film

Based on “The Key Game.” Le Jeu de la Clé. Directed by Michel Hassan. France: 1995.

Based on The Journey. Das Letzte Versteck. Directed by Pierre Koralnik. Germany: 2002.

Ida Fink: Rishumim Le-Korot Hayyim (Ida Fink: Traces). Directed by Roni Abulafia. Israel: 2004.

Documentary: The Garden that floated away. Directed by Ruth Walk. Israel: 2007.

Based on several of her short stories, Spring 1941. Directed by Uri Barbash. Israel: 2008.

Holocaust partisan and survivor, the writer Ida Fink.

Institution: Yad Vashem, Jerusalem.

How to cite this page

Horowitz, Sara R.. 'Ida Fink.' Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 27 February 2009. Jewish Women's Archive. (Viewed on March 9, 2021) <https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/fink-ida>.