Born: 1890 (circa), Greece (assumed)
Died: 13 October 1982
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Mary Papanikolaou, Andromachi Mavrogeni
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Most folks with a vagina do not look forward to their Pap smears, a routine test in which a small scraping of cells is taken to test for abnormalities that may indicate problems like cervical cancer. But it’s hard to argue with the numbers, given that it has been shown to reduce cervical cancer deaths by as much as 80 percent. While the test is named for Greek pathologist Georgios Papanikolaou, few people acknowledge that it was his wife, Andromachi “Mary” Papanikolaou, who spent more than 20 years having her own cervix scraped on a daily basis to provide the testing materials he needed, in addition to managing his laboratory and recruiting her friends to donate their own samples as well.