Anna Wessels Williams

For other people named Anna Williams, see Anna Williams (disambiguation).

Anna Wessels Williams
Born	(1863-03-17)March 17, 1863 Hackensack, New Jersey
Died	1954 (aged 90–91) Westwood, New Jersey
Nationality	American
Education	Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary
Occupation	pathologist
Years active	1891-1934
Known for	Park-Williams bacillus Park-Williams fixative Williams' stain
Notable work	helped to develop a treatment for diphtheria
Parents	William Williams (father) Jane Van Saun (mother)

Dr. Anna Wessels Williams (1863–1954) was an American pathologist who worked at the first municipal diagnostic laboratory in the United States. She used her medical training from the Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary for research rather than clinical practice, and over the course of her career, she contributed to the development of vaccines, treatments and diagnostic tests for many diseases, including diphtheria, rabies, scarlet fever, smallpox, influenza, and meningitis. Notably, a strain of diphtheria-causing bacteria that Williams isolated and cultivated was instrumental in producing an antitoxin that helped bring the disease under control. In 1932, she became the first woman elected chair of the laboratory section of the American Public Health Association.

Early life

Anna Wessels Williams was born in 1863 in Hackensack, New Jersey, to Jane Van Saun and William Williams. After graduating from a local high school in 1883, she worked as a schoolteacher.

Her life took a significant turn in 1887, when her sister Millie nearly escaped died while giving birth to a stillborn child. Anna believed that the attending physician's inadequate training contributed to the tragedy. Motivated by this experience, she resigned from teaching and decided to pursue a career in medicine. Later that year, she enrolled in the Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary, where she studied pioneers such as Elizabeth Blackwell and Mary Putnam Jacobi .

Reflecting on this decision, Williams later wrote:

I was starting on a way that had been practically untrod before by any woman. My belief at the time in human individuality, regardless of sex, race, religion or any factor other than ability was at its strongest. I believed, therefore, that females should have equal opportunities with males to develop their powers to the utmost.

After graduating in 1891, Williams returned to her alma mater to teach pathology and hygiene. She later pursued further medical training in Vienna, Austria, and in Heidelberg, Leipzig, and Dresden in Germany.

Research career

Work on Diphtheria

In 1894, Williams began volunteering at the New York City Department of Health's diagnostic laboratory, the first municipal laboratory in the United States. The lab had opened just a year earlier in response to a cholera outbreak. Working closely with the laboratory's director, William H. Park, Williams participated in efforts to combat diphtheria. During her first year, she successfully isolated a strain of the diphtheria bacillus that could be used to produce large quantities of the antitoxin, which had been discovered in 1890. This breakthrough significantly increased the supply of the antitoxin and reduced its cost, making it widely accessible and contributing to the control of this disease.

Within a year of her discovery, the antitoxin was being distributed free of charge to physicians in the United States and England to meet the growing demand. Williams was soon appointed to a full-time staff position as assistant bacteriologist.

Although Williams made the discovery while Park was away, the inherently collaborative nature of laboratory research led to the strain being named Park-Williams No. 8, in recognition of both scientists. Over time, the name was often shortened to Park 8 in informal usage. Williams, however, expressed no concern about sharing credit, stating, "I am happy to have the honor of having my name thus associated with Dr. Park."

Work on Rabies

In 1896, Williams traveled to the Pasteur Institute in Paris in hopes of finding a toxin for scarlet fever that could be used to develop an antitoxin, similar to her earlier work with diphtheria. Although she was unsuccessful in this pursuit, she became interested in the rabies research being conducted at the institute. Upon returning to New York, Williams brought back a culture of the rabies virus for use in vaccine development. Using this culture, she successfully produced small quantities of a rabies vaccine, sparking greater interest in vaccine research within the United States. By 1898, an effective vaccine that could be manufactured on a large scale had been developed.

Williams then turned her focus to improving the diagnosis of rabies, which posed a major challenge due to the disease's long incubation period. Often, by the time symptoms appeared and the disease was diagnosed, it was too late for the vaccine to be effective. Through the study of brain tissue from infected animals, Williams discovered that the virus caused distinctive cellular changes in the brain before symptoms became apparent—changes that could potentially aid in earlier diagnosis.

However, in 1904, Italian physician Adelchi Negri published similar findings, becoming the first to report the presence of these abnormal cells, which were subsequently named Negri bodies in his honor.In 1905, Williams developed an improved method for preparing and staining brain tissue to detect Negri bodies. Her technique provided results within minutes—compared to the days required by previous methods— and became the standard diagnostic tool for rabies for the next thirty years. In recognition of her expertise, the American Public Health Association appointed Williams as chair of a new committee on standard methods for rabies diagnosis in 1907.

Later Work

In 1905, Williams was promoted to assistant director of the Department of Health laboratory, where she had worked since 1894. In this role, she collaborated with Emily Barringer, M.D., on improving the diagnosis and treatment of venereal disease. She also worked with Josephine Baker's Division of Child Hygiene to develop a more effective diagnostic test for trachoma, a contagious eye disease that was impairing the vision of many urban poor—especially children.

During World War I, Williams directed a training program at New York University on behalf of the War Department to prepare laboratory workers for service in medical facilities medical laboratories both in the United States and abroad. She also conducted research on detectingmeningitis carriers in military population. Following the war, Williams was among the leading scientists working to combat the deadly 1918 influenza pandemic.

In addition to her laboratory research, Williams coauthored two influential books with William H. Park, with whom she maintained a long-standing professional collaboration following their joint work on the diphtheria antitoxin. In 1905, the pair published the widely used medical textbook Pathogenic Micro-organisms Including Bacteria and Protozoa: A Practical Manual for Students, Physicians and Health Officers, which became popularly known as 'Park and Williams' by readers. By 1939, the publication had gone through eleven editions. In 1929, Williams and Park published Who's Who Among the Microbes, one of the earliest biomedical reference books intended for a general audience. [[

Throughout her career, Williams received numerous honors and recognitions. In 1915, she was elected president of the Woman's Medical society of New York. During the 1920s, she conducted extensive studies on scarlet fever. Following the development of the Dick test by George and Gladys Dick to detect the disease, Williams surveyed hundreds of diagnosed cases to assess the effectiveness of antitoxin treatments. In 1931, she was elected to an office in the laboratory section of the American Public Health Association and, the following year, became the first woman appointed as chair of the section. In 1936, the New York Women's Medical Society honored her with a testimonial dinner for her contributions to public health. In her acceptance speech, Williams expressed gratitude to her colleagues, including many of the women who had built careers in bacteriology alongside her or under her mentorship at the Department of Health.

In 1934, despite considerable public support, Williams was forced to retire under New York City's mandatory retirement policy at the age of seventy, along with nearly one hundred other city employees. Upon her retirement, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia described her as "a scientist of international repute". Williams spent her later years living with her sister in Westwood, New Jersey, where she died in 1954 at the age of ninety.

Publications

• Williams, Anna Wessels; Lowden, May Murray (1906). The etiology and diagnosis of hydrophobia.
• Park, William Hallock; Williams, Anna Wessels (1910). Pathogenic micro-organisms, including bacteria and Protozoa; a practical manual for students, physicians and health officers. Internet Archive. New York; Philadelphia, Lea & Febiger.
  • Park, William Hallock; Williams, Anna W. (1905). Pathogenic micro-organisms, including bacteria and Protozoa; a practical manual for students, physicians and health officers (2d ed., enl. and thoroughly rev. ed.). New York and: Lea brothers & co.
  • Park, William Hallock; Williams, Anna Wessels (1939). Pathogenic Microörganisms: A Practical Manual for Students, Physicians and Health Officers. Lea & Febiger.
• Park, William Hallock; Williams, Anna Wessels (1929). Who's who among the microbes. Internet Archive. New York, Century. Log-in required.
• Williams, Anna Wessels (1932). Streptococci in relation to man in health and disease. London : Baillière, Tindall & Cox; Baltimore : Williams & Wilkins.
• Williams, Anna Wessels (1935). Autobiography, Chapter 22. pp. 27–. Retrieved 2019-10-24. Courtesy of: 79-M182--81-M157, Carton 2, Harvard University, The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Schlesinger Library, Cambridge. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help) Manuscript.

Further reading

• O'Hern, Elizabeth Moot (1985). “Anna Wessels Williams 1863–1954”. Profiles of Pioneer Women Scientists. Acropolis Books. pp. 32–. ISBN 9780874918113.
• Sicherman, Barbara; Green, Carol Hurd (1980). “Anna Wessels Williams. Military: Florence Aby Blanchfield --”. Notable American Women: The Modern Period: A Biographical Dictionary. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 9781849722704. OCLC 221276972.
• “Williams, Anna Wessels--1863–1954”. Records of the Bureau of Vocational Information, 1908–1932. Schlesinger. (1908). OCLC 706356125.

External links

• Anna Wessels Williams Papers. Schlesinger Library Archived 2012-05-09 at the Wayback Machine, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
• National Library of Medicine, Dr. Anna Wessels Williams Biography

This article incorporates text from the United States National Library of Medicine ([1]), which is in the public domain.