Katherine Coward

One of the earliest biochemists was Katherine Hope Coward,49 who was born on 2 July 1885, daughter of a teacher. Unlike other biochemists who started with chemistry, Coward studied botany at the University of Manchester, obtaining a B.Sc. in 1906 and an M.Sc. in 1908. 

In 1920, Coward entered University College, London (UCL), to study biochemistry. Awarded a Beit Fellowship, she undertook research on vitamin A with Jack Drummond,50 a total of 22 publications being authored or co-authored from her work. She was elected Fellow of the Chemical Society in 1923, one of her nominators being Katherine Burke (see Chap. 3). Receiving her D.Sc. in biochemistry in 1924, she travelled to the United States on a Rockefeller Travelling Scholarship to continue her studies on vitamin A at the Department of Agricultural Chemistry of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. 

Returning to Britain in 1926, Coward took charge of the newly formed vitamin-testing department of the Pharmaceutical Society s Pharmacological Laboratories, and she was also appointed Reader in Biochemistry at the University of London in 1933. Her research broadened to include the study of each of the vitamins, resulting in a total of 62 additional papers, five of the later publications being coauthored with Elsie Woodward (Mrs. Kassner see Chap. 10). One of her obituarists, J.H.B., described the crucial role of her contributions  

The work she did when in charge of the vitamin-testing Department of the Pharmaceutical Society s Pharmacological Laboratories was of outstanding importance. There were already qualitative methods for various vitamins, but there was a grave lack of methods which were quantitative. 

Dr Coward was a mathematician with a knowledge of, and a liking for, statistical methods, and was therefore ideally suited for the work of defining such quantitative methods as were 

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Smedley was not the only one to be chosen as the expectation for a woman chemist or biochemist. A 1929 article in the Journal of Careers18 held up Martha Whiteley (Chap. 3) as a role model while an article in the same journal in 193819 extolled Ida Smedley (Chap. 2), Marjory Stephenson (Chap. 8), Katherine Coward (see below), and particularly Dorothy Jordan Lloyd (Chap. 8) as the heights of careers to which women chemists and biochemists could aspire — but only those who were exceptional. 

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