Sara Branham graduated from Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, in 1907. Her grandmother, Elizabeth Flournoy Stone, was a member of the Class of 1840. Her mother, Amanda Stone Branham, graduated in 1885, and was a member of the Adelphean Society, which became Alpha Delta Pi. Sara and her mother shared the Alpha Delta Pi bond.
Teaching was one of the few professions open to women in the early 1900s, and she spent 10 years teaching in Sparta, Decatur and Atlanta, Georgia. In 1908, she was a member of the Oxford ADPi Alumnae Association. During those then years teaching in Georgia, she had several mentions in The Adelphean. There was the report of her spending the winter in Mexico with her brother an the one that she attended the Grand Opera in Atlanta with a group of ADPis.
Branham attended the establishment of the Lambda Chapter of ADPi in 1910.
In 1917, she headed to Boulder, Colorado to study at the University of Colorado. With men leaving the campus to fight in World War I, she was hired by the university as a bacteriology instructor. She once quipped, “When I had had about six weeks of bacteriology, they offered me a job to teach it!”
In the meantime she earned a second bachelors in 1919. She then enrolled at the University of Chicago where she earned a Ph.D. and M.D. while studying influenza outbreaks. She worked as an instructor there until she took a job at the University of Rochester School of Medicine in 1927.
A meningococcus outbreak in California led Branham to take a job with the Hygienic Laboratory of the United States Public Health Service (now National Institutes of Health) in Bethesda, Maryland. She remained with the agency until her retirement in 1958.
Dr. Sara Branham (Courtesy of the Oxford Histoical Society)
She discovered and isolated the virus which is the cause of spinal meningitis, Neisseria meningitidis. She also discovered that sulfa drugs could treat the infection. She was the expert on this strain of the disease. She discovered other anti-toxins and had a hand in the classification of microorganisms. In 1970, Neisseria catarrhalis was renamed in her honor; it became Brahamella catarrhalis.
Branham was a diplomate of the National Board of Medical Examiners and the American Board of Pathology. She achieved fellow status in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Public Health Association, and the American Academy of Microbiology.
In 1950, she was a commencement speak at her undergraduate alma mater and received the first Distinguished Achievement Award given by the Wesleyan College Alumnae Association. She also served as an Alumnae Trustee at Wesleyan and was a loyal contributor to the college’s Loyalty Fund.
She had a brief marriage to Philip S. Matthews. They married in 1945, but he died four years later; professionally she was always Sara Branham.
In the late 1950s, she visited Wesleyan College and spoke about her career, which included publishing 80 papers. She died in 1962. Among the items in the Wesleyan College archives is a dress she donated which belonged to her family.
Photo and caption courtesy of Wesleyan College.
