Hélène Sparrow (5 June 1891 – 13 November 1970), was a Polish medical doctor and bacteriologist. She helped to control epidemics including: typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and smallpox. Throughout the 1920s, Sparrow worked with the Polish Armed Forces at the State Institute of Hygiene in Warsaw. While at the State Institute of Hygiene, she produced the first vaccine against typhus and ran vaccination campaigns to control the spread of diphtheria and scarlet fever along the eastern frontiers of Poland. In 1933, Sparrow began to study flea-borne and louse-borne rickettsia diseases in Tunis, where she led her own department at the Pasteur Institute. In her later years, she expanded her studies to include Mexico and Guatemala where she developed a protective vaccine against typhus. She contributed significant research to the World Health Organization on relapsing fever in Ethiopia.
Early life Sparrow was born on 5 June 1891 in Bohuslav, Kiev Governorate. Her parents married in 1890. Her mother was X. Stefanska (b. c 1870) and her father Leopold Sparrow (born c. 1860) was a magistrate of English origin. She was educated at a secondary school in Kiev, gaining a gold medal and then attended the Faculty of Medicine in Kiev, obtaining a medical diploma (cum laude) in 1915. She obtained a second degree in medicine from University of Poznań in 1923. She obtained her doctorate in 1928 from the University of Warsaw.
Academic career In 1915 she became involved in the control of epidemic disease within the Russian army during the First World War. Once fighting ended, she began working in clinics in Dorpat (now Tartu, Estonia), supervised by Professor Bylina, soon moving to the Institute of Bacteriology in Kiev as an assistant to Wolodymyr Lindeman. She began to work on epidemic typhus with Oleksii Krontovski and L. Polev. In 1920 she went to Warsaw to work with Dr Ludwik Rajchman, the Director of the State Institute of Hygiene. In 1922 she was appointed Chief of Service and then in 1928 became the Chief of the Preventative Vaccinations Service. This included organising vaccination campaigns and also investigation of cholera outbreaks. She obtained a second medical degree from University of Poznań in 1923. Between 1921 and 1933 she also worked with Rudolf Weigl at the University of Lwów on epidemic typhus. During this time she was involved in setting up four public health laboratories in eastern Poland to benefit people relocated following national boundary changes as well as supervising large-scale programmes of vaccination against diphtheria and scarlet fever in the Warsaw region, supported by Robert Debré. She obtained her first tenured academic post in 1928 as an associate professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Warsaw, presenting her doctoral thesis on Problèmes de la vaccination contre le typhus exanthématique (The problems of vaccinations against exanthematic typhus) and was subsequently the Professor of Bacteriology. She managed microbiology training and actively participating in medical societies in Poland and the Warsaw branch of the French Société de biologie into the 1930s.
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