Dorothy is the oldest of four sisters, Joan Crowfoot Payne, Diana Crowfoot Rowley, and Elisabeth Crowfoot. …show more content…
She was persuaded to use her married name.Crowfoot was not in the laboratory when the pepsin crystals were first thought of. She was at the doctors with severe pains in her hands. She had early signs of arthritis. When she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, she was Twenty-four years old. It affected both her hands and feet. She needed the assistance of a wheelchair when she got older. She returned to looking at crystals closely after her arthritis got a little better. She helped with the analysis of the crystals a little later in the research. She was able to work more or less normally during World War II. People were not very familiar with the research that Dorothy was doing and that is why when Dorothy Hodgkin started her research it was still considered brand new. It was a combination of mathematics, physics, and chemistry. In her studies of crystals, she learned crystals could be made naturally or artificially. At first there were thousands of equations involved with the simplest crystals. The equations were used to build what's called an electron density map. It shows where the crystals electrons are most concentrated. The process of analysing crystals with x-rays could take months. Sometimes, even