During a long professional career doing research at the New York City Department of Health Laboratory, Anna Williams pioneered laboratory techniques for the diagnosis of many diseases. Dr. Williams also wrote and lectured about her findings in an era when women in science were few and very rarely recognized for their contributions.

Anna Wessels Williams was born in 1863 in Hackensack, New Jersey and graduated from the Women's Medical College in New York City in 1891. She studied in Europe for a time, during which she visited Robert Koch, the discoverer of tuberculosis bacteria. When she returned to New York she began work for the Department of Health, where her first research assignment was in the diagnosis and treatment of diphtheria, a bacterial disease that was on the rise during the mid-1890s. Dr. Williams successfully isolated one strain of diphtheria bacteria, Corynebacterium diphtheriae, although her work went uncredited at...