After battling lifelong health problems, including rheumatic heart disease and a leg amputation, McConnell died in 1975.
She was sent to live with her aunt and grandfather so that she could attend Colorado Springs High School; she graduated at the age of 15 and was awarded a full scholarship to the University of Denver.
Although her father had previously paid for 17 men to attend medical school, he refused to pay for Frances' tuition because he deemed medicine to be "too hard a life for a woman".
[1] Despite working on numerous high-profile, widely publicized cases, McConnell kept her life as private as possible and only ever gave one interview during her career.
In the 1930s and 1940s she undertook personal research into passive immunity and developed serums for scarlet fever, polio, the common cold and acne for use on family members.
In 1941, she was appointed director of the laboratory department of the Colorado State Board of Health, and she later founded Denver General Hospital's School for Medical Technologists in order to train new workers, especially women.
She enrolled in an advanced serology training program at the University of Michigan in 1941 and went on to study surgical pathology at the Cook County Hospital in Chicago in 1943.
[10] Following her term at Cook County, she resigned from the Board of Health and accepted a role at St. Luke's Hospital in Denver as a laboratory director and pathologist.
[11] She was forced to leave St. Luke's in 1944 due to illness, and after recovering she returned to Denver General Hospital as its laboratory director.
[12] She kept working until the last two weeks of her life,[14] filling various roles on the Board of Basic Sciences, in an allergy practice, and as a consultant for the Denver Poison Center.
The project began when Varnell set out to write a biography of her mother, but was urged by her editor to do the same for all 59 of the women in the Hall of Fame at the time, and compile them into a book.