Florence Sabin was born in the mining town of Central City, Colorado, to Vermont natives. Her paternal grandfather had been a Vermont country doctor; her father had studied medicine for two years before following the gold and silver rush West as a mining engineer. Her mother switched teaching posts from the South to Colorado during the Civil War. After her mother's death, when Florence was four, the girl attended boarding schools, first in Denver and then near relatives in Illinois and Vermont. She attended Smith College in Massachusetts with her sister, Mary, where she studied mathematics and zoology, graduating with a bachelor of science degree in 1893.

That same year, the Johns Hopkins Medical School opened, thanks to the funds raised by a group of Baltimore women who had stipulated that the school must admit women on an equal footing with men. After teaching for three years, Sabin could...