Edith Bülbring

Who was Edith Bülbring?

Edith Bülbring was a British scientist in the field of smooth muscle physiology, one of the first women accepted to the Royal Society as a fellow. She was Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Oxford, later Emeritus Professor and member of Lady Margaret Hall college, Oxford.

Born in Bonn, Germany, Bülbring was the daughter of Hortense Leonore and Karl Bülbring, a Professor of English. She was educated in medicine at the universities of Bonn, Munich and Freiburg, and became research assistant to the pharmacologist Ulrich Friedemann. When he and other Jewish colleagues were dismissed by the Nazis, she was initially overlooked, because she was only partly Jewish, but eventually she was dismissed too.

Together with her older sisters Luci and Maud, she traveled to England in 1933, where she joined the laboratory of J.H. Burn at the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, University of London. When Burn was offered the post of Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford in 1938, she went with him. She remained as Burn's assistant until 1946, when she was appointed University Demonstrator and Lecturer, and began to conduct her own research independently.