For more than a century, we could see Florence Buchanan’s science but not Florence Buchanan. Her papers and electrical traces survived, and her work placed her alongside some of the most influential physiologists of the early 20th century. Yet until recently, no authenticated portrait of Buchanan was known.
Authors
- Damian Bailey
Professor of Physiology and Biochemistry, University of South Wales
- Brian Clark
Distinguished Professor of Physiology and Neuroscience and Executive Director of the Ohio Musculoskeletal and Neurological Institute (OMNI), Ohio University
- Frances Ashcroft
Emeritus Professor, Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford
Our recent research has now recovered that missing face. There is an irony here: Buchanan used sensitive recording instruments to turn the tiny electrical changes accompanying muscle activity into visible traces. These recordings allowed her to measure events too brief for the eye to follow, helping her investigate how signals travelling through nerves produce a muscular response.
In 1908, Buchanan published a study of spinal reflexes in frogs. It was the opening paper in the first volume of The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Physiology. Using a capillary electrometer, an early electrical recorder that turned tiny voltage changes in muscle into photographic traces, Buchanan could distinguish an immediate muscle response from a later reflex that had travelled into and back out of the spinal cord.
After allowing for the time taken by signals travelling along peripheral nerves, she estimated that a frog’s spinal cord introduced a delay of roughly 12 to 22 milliseconds. Her measurement captured the overall delay produced within the spinal cord during the reflex. Later research was able to separate the different processes contributing to that interval, showing that transmission across an individual synapse, the junction where one nerve cell passes a signal to another, could take far less time than the reflex as a whole.
Buchanan’s experiments therefore provided early evidence that the spinal cord did more than carry signals between the body and brain. Information was being processed within the nervous system itself, an idea that became fundamental to understanding how networks of nerve cells receive, modify and pass on information.
Contribution without belonging
Buchanan was also making herself visible in a scientific world built largely for men. In 1896 she became the first woman known to attend a meeting of The Physiological Society . But attendance did not necessarily mean belonging. She was not allowed to join the society dinner, one of the informal spaces where scientific relationships and reputations were forged.
These dinners were far more than social occasions. They were the centrepiece of the society’s meetings, and routinely included live animal experiments and physiological demonstrations, reflecting the hands-on experimental culture of the period. Ernest Starling, one of Britain’s leading physiologists and a prominent member of the society, captured the attitudes of the time with an extraordinary objection to admitting women : “it would be improper to dine with ladies smelling of dog, the men smelling of dog that is”.
In July 1915, Buchanan became one of the society’s first six women members, finally receiving the same formal rights, duties and privileges as men. The rules were changing, but the culture would take much longer to follow.
Institutional barriers were not the only constraints Buchanan learned to work around. Her sister Lilian Adam Smith’s privately published 1941 memoir, The Buchanan Family , records that Buchanan’s eyesight progressively deteriorated, apparently because of retinal detachment. In 1901, it became so severe that she was ordered to spend three months lying flat on her back. Unable to write, she dictated to a friend an entire 66-page scientific paper on the electrical activity of muscle , an extraordinary feat of memory and concentration.
As her sight failed further, she adapted again. Her laboratory was kept sufficiently unchanged for her to navigate it through memory and touch, and she documented her own visual symptoms in the hope that they might help others. She ultimately donated her eyes for scientific study.
She continued cycling despite the alarm of relatives. When urged to stop, she replied: “Do not ask me to give up the one bit of adventure that is left in my life.” Despite all we knew about her science and character, however, we still had no face by which to remember her.
Finding Florence
Faced with that visual absence, in 2026 I created a provisional AI-assisted reconstruction of how Buchanan might have appeared . It was explicitly presented as an evidence-informed visual hypothesis, with no claim that it represented her recovered face. AI tools were later used more narrowly to help widen the search for an authentic image, suggesting additional terms and combinations to try in archival catalogues. The discovery itself, however, came through conventional archival research: searching collections and following the documentary trail until we found her.
Brian Clark found a securely captioned portrait in the same 1941 family memoir by Buchanan’s sister. The book, held by the National Library of Scotland, was primarily a record of the Buchanan family and their famous father, public-health physician Sir George Buchanan. Florence had not vanished from the archive. In a sense, she had been filed under a man.
The photograph shows a bespectacled woman in profile. “Florence Buchanan” appears beneath it, the memoir’s list of illustrations identifies the plate, and the portrait sits opposite her sister’s remembrance of her. The discovery did more than supply a missing face. It reconnected the scientific record with the woman who created it.
This story reaches far beyond physiology. Women working in science today inhabit a very different world from Buchanan’s, but unequal visibility and recognition have not disappeared. Unesco reports that only around one in three researchers worldwide is a woman, with scientific leaders even more poorly represented. A study of 9,778 research teams likewise found that women were less likely than men to receive authorship or inventor credit for work produced by their teams.
Scientific memory, after all, is built from more than just data. It is also built from portraits, prizes, biographies, lecture slides and the people repeatedly held up as the faces of discovery. Who we see shapes our sense of who belongs.
Florence Buchanan spent her career turning fleeting electrical events into permanent traces. Those traces survived for more than a century, yet her portrait remained overlooked. Now, at long last, the science and the scientist can be seen together.
