Anna Wessels Williams spent decades at a bench in the New York City Department of Health's diagnostic laboratory, the first municipal lab of its kind in the country.

She began her career by making diphtheria treatment accessible to everyone, then made rabies diagnosis dramatically faster. Over the nearly forty years that followed, she made significant contributions against many of the deadliest diseases of her era.

She also spent very little time worrying about whose name ended up on the credit.

image credit: National Library of Medicine

In 1953, a government cancer researcher inoculated mice with material from leukemic animals and found something nobody had documented before: tumors growing in a gland that had nothing to do with the experiment.

It took Sarah Stewart three decades, a second graduate degree, and a position she never registered for to get to do the work she really wanted to do. Once there, the virus she isolated produced twenty different kinds of tumors and helped prove, for the first time, that cancer could be infectious.

image credit: National Library of Medicine

In 1918, a government dairy bacteriologist published a paper connecting two organisms that the field had classified as entirely unrelated, and proposed that cow's milk was a vector for a debilitating human disease.

Alice Evans was dismissed for a decade. She spent twenty-three years living inside the illness she had correctly identified while the evidence accumulated, undeniably, in her direction.

image credit: Library of Congress, National Photo Company Collection