Anna Wessels Williams (1863–1954) was an American pathologist and public-health physician 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—later named Park-Williams No. 8—was instrumental in producing an antitoxin that helped bring the disease under control.
Williams also developed the standard diagnostic test for rabies, coauthored several widely used medical texts, and was among the first American women to make lasting contributions to laboratory medicine. 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, a private-school teacher. She was educated at home by her father and attended the State Street Public School, where her father served as a trustee. Williams developed a passion for science at a young age, particularly after using a microscope at age twelve. She graduated from New Jersey State Normal School in Trenton in 1883 and spent two years teaching to save money for medical school.
Her life took a significant turn in 1887 when her sister Millie nearly died while giving birth to a stillbirth child. Anna believed that the attending physician's inadequate training contributed to the tragedy, which motivated her to resign from teaching and to pursue a career in medicine in hopes of preventing such outcomes.
Later that year, she enrolled in the Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary, where she studied under pioneers such as Elizabeth Blackwell and Mary Putnam Jacobi .</blockquote> After graduating in 1891, Williams returned to her alma mater to teach pathology and hygiene. She worked in the children's clinic and "out-practice" before later pursuing further medical training in Europe, attending universities in Vienna, Heidelberg, Leipzig, and interning at the Royal Frauen Klinik of Leopold in Dresden. Williams spent her later years living with her sister in Westwood, New Jersey, where she died in 1954 at the age of ninety.