Lynne M. Reid papers

Lynne M. Reid (1923-2021), M.B. and B.S., 1946, University of Melbourne School of Medicine, was a resident at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Melbourne, Australia (1949-1951); research assistant and founder of the Department of Research in Morbid Anatomy at the Brompton Hospital, London, England; the first person to serve as Dean of the Cardiothoracic Institute at London University (1973); Head of the Department of Pathology at Children’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts (1975-1989); and S. Burt Wolbach Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts. Her research interests included lung growth and how it is affected by childhood diseases including cystic fibrosis, scoliosis, and respiratory distress syndrome. She also studied chronic bronchitis, emphysema, and pediatric pulmonary and arterial hypertension.

Lynne McArthur Reid was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1923; she emigrated to England with her family in 1934. In 1940, she moved back to Australia to attend Melbourne Medical School at the University of Melbourne, where she completed her studies and received a M.B. and B.S. (the contemporary Australian equivalent of an M.D.) in 1946. After graduation, she was the first researcher to receive a grant in pathology from the National Health and Medical Research Council at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. From 1949 to 1951, she worked as a researcher at the Royal Melbourne. In 1951, she returned to England as a research assistant at the Institute of Diseases of the Chest at Brompton Hospital in London. There, she became the founder and first director of the Department of Research in Morbid Anatomy. In 1965, Reid became the first Hastings Visiting Professor in Pathology at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Medicine, staying at UCLA for two years before moving back to London to become the first female Professor of Experimental Pathology at London University in 1967. In 1971, she was appointed Walker-Ames Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, and after two years there, she returned to London University to become the first Dean of the Cardiothoracic Institute in 1973. In 1975, Reid was appointed S. Burt Wolbach Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School and Pathologist-in-Chief at Children’s Hospital in Boston, positions she held until her retirement in the early 1990s. Reid’s research focused on thoracic medicine, with her early work in Australia centered on bronchiectasis, a pathological widening of the bronchi within the lungs. Upon moving to London, Reid began to investigate additional thoracic conditions, including chronic bronchitis and emphysema. She also studied the physical and chemical nature of the mucous produced in the lungs as a result of these diseases and the cell types included in the mucous. Her interests broadened during her career to include pulmonary hypertension and lung growth.

In addition to her academic appointments, Reid was a member of several societies, including the Royal College of Radiologists and the Fleischner Society, where she was the only female member for twenty-five years. In Great Britain, she served as faculty chairman of the Medical Advisory Committee of the Cystic Fibrosis Research Trust and, in Massachusetts, as Chairman of Harvard Medical School’s Joint Committee on the Status of Women from 1989 to 1990. Reid served as the first female dean of the Institute of Diseases of the Chest at London University and was the first pathologist to become an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Radiologists. She was named an Honorary Fellow of the Canadian Thoracic Society in 1973 and she received multiple honors during the course of her career, including the Chadwick Medal in 1985 and the Trudeau Medal in 1991. Reid died on 5 April 2021 in Brookline, Mass.