Evelyn Hickmans

Evelyn Marion Hickmans,97 bom in Wolverhampton in 1883, obtained a B.Sc. at the University of Birmingham in 1905 and an M.Sc. in 1906. In 1909, she was a signatory of the 1909 letter to Chemical News, but she gave no affiliation. Curiously, there is no record of her from 1906 until 1919, apart from an unsuccessful application for a Demonstratorship at Bedford in 1906. From 1919 until 1922, she was a Lecturer in the Household Science Department of the University of Toronto, Canada, returning to England in 1923. 

Hickman s cousin, Leonard Parsons, a Professor specialising in children s diseases at the Children s Hospital, Birmingham, asked her if she would help him with his investigations.98 She started the following day, a week later being requested to undertake blood chemical analyses for the whole hospital. This she did, being appointed Head of Department. Between 1924 and 1956, Hickmans authored and co-authored 13 publications in a wide variety of studies, mostly on the relationship of abnormal blood chemistry to childhood diseases. 

Their discovery was published in 1954, and the groundbreaking article has been considered so important that the journal Acta Psediatrica reproduced the first page of the original paper in an issue of 2001 on the 47th anniversary of the original publication.99 The three researchers received the John Scott Medal for contributions to the comfort, welfare and happiness of mankind from the City Trust, Philadelphia, in 1962 for their work on 

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