Helen Archibald Binnie was born in 1882. Her father was a physician. While a student at the University of Wisconsin, she became a member of the Beta chapter of Alpha Gamma Delta. Her sister Nora Belle, who became a teacher, was also a member of the chapter.
In June 1911, Helen graduated from the Wisconsin College of Physicians and Surgeons in Milwaukee. According to a report in the Alpha Gamma Delta Quarterly, “Only one other woman beside Helen graduated in the class. Helen’s home is in Poynette, Wisconsin, but her attendance at medical school during the last two years allowed her to become one of the most active of the Milwaukee alumnae.” She did extensive hospital and clinic work at Johns Hopkins, Rush Medical College, Children’s Hospital in Milwaukee and Government Hospital in D. C.
She attended the 1913 Alpha Gam convention. The Quarterly mentioned that she was toast-mistress at the banquet of the Wisconsin Medical Women’s Society held at the Hotel Pfister, Milwaukee, on September 30, 1913.
In 1914, an update in The Quarterly reported that she was the superintendent Frostburg’s Miners’ Hospital at Frostburg, Maryland. She found it “difficult but interesting work.” She returned to Poynette in 1916 to practice in her father’s office.
In an article she wrote for The Quarterly, she said:
As the earliest women physicians practiced principally or entirely with women, we undoubtedly grew into the medical profession from a demand for women physicians by our own sex. Now however, from the many different avenues in the vast field of medicine we have the opportunity of selecting what we seem best adapted for and may specialize in children’s diseases, mental and nervous diseases, obstetrics and diseases of women, surgery, internal medicine, research work, laboratory and many more. Women physicians are particularly adapted for many of these named. Unless a woman has a real love for the profession she should not take up the work as it is a life of constant study, hard work and enormous responsibility no matter what line she chooses, and in a science in which such rapid progress is being made one must be constantly a student.
In 1922, she moved her practice to Kenosha, Wisconsin. There, she married Otto Zank in 1927. A life member of the American Medical Association and the Wisconsin State Medical Association, Dr. Zank retired from practice in 1950. The couple retired to Portage, Wisconsin, where she was a member of St. Mary’s Catholic Church. Otto died in 1970 and she died on February 3, 1976 at the age of 93.
