Ruth Moore Graham was a dedicated teacher, researcher, and talented writer who did much to further the acceptance of cytology as a cancer detection technique. She was born in 1917 in Paris, Idaho, the daughter of a general medical practitioner. Her school years were spent in Idaho and in Salt Lake City. She attended George Washington University in Washington, DC for one year, planning to major in political science, then transferred to The University of Michigan, where she received a Bachelor of Science in Zoology in 1938. She then studied for one year at Simmons College in Boston in a graduate course in laboratory technology.
In her first position, at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Boston, a cancer research hospital associated with Harvard University, she worked as a hematology technician. While at Huntington Memorial Hospital, she did some of the first research on the use of chemotherapy in malignancy, observing that patients with leukemia showed a definite reduction in the level of circulating leukemic cells when treated with sulfapyridine; her first published paper was based on this study.
In 1940, Ruth Moore married John B. Graham, who had just graduated from Harvard Medical School and who became a gynecologist, and the couple established their home in San Francisco. Mrs. Graham worked for six months in the coroner's office, recording observations on necropsies and preparing histologic specimens. Later she worked in the Department of Pathology at San Francisco County Hospital.
The Grahams returned to Boston in 1941, where Mrs. Graham worked at the Massachusetts General Hospital as a Research Assistant in the Department of Medicine. She