Irena G. Koprowska | pathology professor, 95

She escaped from Poland soon after earning her medical degree in December 1939, three months after the Nazi invasion.

She then worked in Rio de Janeiro, performing more than 400 autopsies while reporting her findings in Latin to a translator because she was not fluent in Portuguese, the language of Brazil.

And seven years after arriving in Philadelphia in 1957, she became the first woman to be named a full professor at Hahnemann Medical College, according to an archivist at its successor, the Drexel University College of Medicine.

On Thursday, Aug. 16, Dr. Irena Grasberg Koprowska, 95, a pathology professor at Temple University School of Medicine from 1970 to her retirement in 1987, died at her home in Wynnewood.

Her husband, Dr. Hilary Koprowski, developed the first polio vaccine in the late 1940s and was director of the Wistar Institute from 1957 to 1991, the Wistar website states.

Among her own accomplishments, her son Christopher said, was that "she encouraged young women to go into medicine without feeling that they were somehow sacrificing a part of their lives."

A biography on the website of the National Library of Medicine reports that at Cornell University Medical College in New York City, she worked with "her greatest mentor, Dr. George N. Papanicolaou, inventor of the Pap smear, a diagnostic tool for uterine cancer.

"In the 1950s, Dr. Koprowska was one of his research fellows and became his closest associate; they also coauthored a case report of the earliest diagnosis of lung cancer by a sputum smear," it states.

Her son, a physician, explained that "they saw some suspicious cells" in matter coughed up by a patient, but the cells "weren't definitively lung cancer."

"The patient subsequently died of an unrelated condition and they found at autopsy that the patient had . . . cancer of the lung."

Her specialty became cytopathology, the study of cells in diseases.

Born in Warsaw, Dr. Koprowska married her classmate at the University of Warsaw Medical School in 1938. After fleeing Poland, she worked briefly as a medical intern at what was known as a lunatic asylum in Nazi-occupied France.

They found their way to Rio, where she was employed as a hospital's assistant pathologist starting in 1942.

In 1944, she and her husband entered the United States, where she completed her residency in pathology at Cornell University Medical College in the late 1940s.

Her son said that in 1954 she became an assistant professor of pathology at what is now the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.

When the family moved to Philadelphia in 1957, her son said, she was hired that year by Hahnemann Medical College as director of its cytopathology laboratory.

Starting in 1970, she was director of the similar laboratory at Temple University Hospital and pathology professor at Temple's medical school.

Dr. Koprowska was a founding member of the Inter Society Council of Cytology, which became the American Society of Cytopathology and which, in 1985, gave her its Papanicolaou Award.

She was also a member of the American Medical Women's Association.

Besides her husband and son, she is survived by another son, Claude; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Private services are planned for the end of September.