Mary Tebb

Her brother William was a medical doctor and her sister Florence was a mathematician who, like Mary, studied at Girton.

[1] At Girton College, Cambridge, Mary studied natural sciences between 1887 and 1893, where she gained a double first and specialised in physiology in Part II.

[1][3] During this time, she published papers on enzymatic hydrolysis of complex carbohydrates and on the structure of protein fibres in connective tissue.

[4] Between 1907 and 1910, she collaborated with King’s College’s lecturer in physiological chemistry, Otto Rosenheim, a German chemist who had emigrated to England in 1894 to escape antisemitism.

[5] They studied protagon, a crystalline material produced by the brain, and established that it was a mixture rather than a chemical compound.