Anna Wessels Williams

American pathologist at the first municipal diagnostic laboratory in the United States. She used her medical training from the Women's Medical College of the New York Infirmary for research rather than medical practice, and over the course of her career worked on developing vaccines, treatments and diagnostic tests for many diseases, including diphtheria, rabies,[1] scarlet fever, smallpox, influenza, and meningitis. Notably, a strain of diphtheria-causing bacteria that Williams isolated and cultivated was instrumental in producing an antitoxin to bring the disease under control.[2] In 1932, she became the first woman to be elected chair of the laboratory section of the American Public Health Association.[3]