Inspiring Women
in History & Science
A slow-built archive of women whose work was dismissed, whose pain was minimized, and whose findings reshaped what we now understand about the body, the mind, and the long arc of healing — and the heavens above us.
Tasked with finding a malaria treatment as the disease killed on a massive scale, she did something few modern scientists would think to do: she went back into fourth-century Chinese medical texts and read them with a chemist’s eye.
One ancient reference to sweet wormwood led her to artemisinin — a compound that has since saved millions of lives worldwide. To prove it was safe, she reportedly tested early doses on herself. In 2015 she became the first Chinese woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Some women found the future by honoring the wisdom the world had forgotten.
This is part of my series on women whose contributions were dismissed, minimized, or uncredited in their own time. I’m honored to tell their stories, because they paved the way for the rest of us.