Maude Elizabeth Seymour Babin was born in St. Andrews East, in 1869. Both of her parents were absent during infancy, as her mother had died and her father had abandoned her. With her sister Alice, she was legally adopted and raised by her maternal grandmother, Mrs. William Abbott, who was then 62. She was a cousin of John Abbott, Canada's third Prime Minister. In 1885, she graduated from a private Montreal seminary high school. Abbott was admitted to McGill University's Faculty of Arts, with a scholarship, even though she had previously been rejected, and received her B.A in 1890. In 1894, she received her M.D., C.M. from Bishop's University with honours, and the only woman in her class. She received the Chancellor's Prize, and Senior Anatomy Prize for having the best final examination.
Career
Later in 1894, she opened her own practice in Montreal, worked with the Royal Victoria hospital, and was nominated and elected as the Montreal Medico-Chirurgical Society's first female member. Some time afterwards, she did her post-graduate medical studies in Vienna. In 1897, she opened an independent clinic dedicated to treating women and children. There, she did much first-hand research in pathology. Much of Abbott's work concerned the nature of heart disease, especially in newborn babies. This would cause her to be recognized as a world authority on heart defects. In 1898, she was appointed Assistant Curator at the McGill Pathological Museum, becoming curator 1901. In 1905, she was invited to write the chapter on 'Congenital Heart Disease' for William Osler's System of Modern Medicine. He declared it "the best thing he had ever read on the subject." The article would place her as the world authority in the field of congenital heart disease. In 1906, she co-founded the International Association of Medical Museums, with Osler. She became its international secretary in 1907. She would edit the institutions articles for thirty-one years. In 1910, Abbott was awarded an honorary medical degree from McGill and was made a lecturer in Pathology; this was eight years prior to the university admitting female students to the Faculty of Medicine. After a much conflict with Dr. Horst Oërtel, she left McGill to take up a position at the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1923. In 1925, Abbott returned to McGill becoming an Assistant Professor. In 1924, she was a founder of the Federation of Medical Women of Canada, a Canadian organization committed to the professional, social and personal advancement of women physicians. In 1936, she wrote the Atlas of Congenital Cardiac Disease. The work illustrated a new classification system and described records of over a thousand cases of clinical and postmortem records. The same year she retired from her professorial position. Abbott was a prolific writer, composing over 140 papers and books. She also gave countless lectures.
