Frieda Fraser (30 August 1899 – 29 July 1994) was a Canadian physician, scientist and academic who worked in infectious disease, including research on scarlet fever and tuberculosis.
From 1928, she lectured in the Department of Hygiene at the University of Toronto on preventive medicine, working her way up from a teaching assistant to a full professor by 1955.
[1][2] Her father was a native Ontarian who had graduated from the University of Toronto (U of T) and taught at the Upper Canada College before being appointed as a lecturer in Italian and Spanish at U of T. He prolifically wrote textbooks which were used in the provincial schools for many years.
In Pennsylvania, Fraser began her post-doctorate training under the direction of Muriel McPhedran at the Phipps Institute for the Study, Treatment and Prevention of Tuberculosis in January 1927, specialising in bacteriology[16] The experiences in her internships were markedly different in that in New York, she lived at the hospital and the staff was predominantly made up of women.
[17] In March 1927, Fraser was offered a position in the Connaught Laboratories, a research facility dedicated to developing vaccines, where her brother worked.
[20] In 1928, Fraser returned to Toronto and took up her research post, simultaneously working as a demonstrator with the Department of Hygiene and Preventative Medicine.
[21] She was one of the founding faculty of the School of Hygiene at U of T.[22] She made her home with her brother Donald; Williams, who had also returned from England, moved in with her own mother.
[23] Though the two women wanted to live together, raise children and continue their careers,[24] they were unwilling to displease or fail in their obligations to their mothers.
[33] She began studies on scarlet fever in the early 1930s,[34] and along with Dr. Helen Plummer isolated the precipitin present in the strains of streptococci likely to lead to disease.
[33] The type of research Fraser was engaged in required that the bacteria of the disease which created a toxin be isolated, so that it could be injected into a horse.
The serum created from the blood of animals which had been immunized, contained an antibody (known at the time as an antitoxin), which could then be injected into humans to cure the disease.
In 1965, both women retired and sold their Toronto home, moving to the farm house owned by the Fraser family in Burlington, Ontario.
Gage had worked in Williams' veterinary clinic and her potential sculptural talent came recommended through mutual friends Frances Loring and Florence Wyle.
[42] The archive contains nearly one thousand letters and is "one of the largest known collections detailing the experiences of women's same-sex sexuality in early twentieth century North America".
Given the cultural norm of their time which depicted same-sex couples as diseased, they referred to themselves as "devoted women", making the distinction that they were not depraved, but had chosen their partnership.
Both dismissed Freud and pseudo-scientific theories which argued for a natural order that governed human actions,[48] instead believing that their attraction was biological and innate, and not influenced by promiscuous living or self-loathing.