Born: November 21 1868, United States
Died: September 30 1939
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following bio was written by Emma Rosen, author of On This Day She Made History: 366 Days With Women Who Shaped the World and This Day In Human Ingenuity & Discovery: 366 Days of Scientific Milestones with Women in the Spotlight, and has been republished with permission.
Martha Wollstein was an American physician born in New York to a German-Jewish family. Martha studied medicine at the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, later joining the Babies Hospital in New York as a pathologist in 1892. In 1904, she became an assistant researcher at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Her research at the Rockefeller Institute covered polio experimentation, pneumonia studies, and contributions to the development of an anti-meningitis serum.
Wollstein’s 1918 research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggested that mumps could be viral. She demonstrated this by transmitting the disease from mumps patients to cats and subsequently between cats through a filtrated preparation. It’s worth noting that credit for identifying the virus and transmitting it from humans to monkeys in the 1930s went to others.
She continued researching children’s diseases until her 1935 retirement from the Babies Hospital. During this period, she explored various children’s diseases, including tuberculosis and leukemia. In 1930, she made history as the first woman to be admitted to the American Pediatric Society.
In 1930, she became the first woman inducted into the American Pediatric Society. Wollstein authored eighty scientific papers and passed away in New York in 1939.