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.
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.
