Microscope Warrior

The newspapers printed her picture. Physicians bombarded the Health Department with petitions and letters on her behalf. The Mayor made a special inspection trip to her working quarters. But in her small laboratory in a musty building at the end of a musty Manhattan street, Dr. Anna Wessels Williams last week kept her eyes to a microscope as closely as she had for 39 years. In those 39 years, first as bacteriologist, then as assistant director of the New York City Health Department's laboratories, she had become one of her country's foremost bacteriologists, winning many a major battle in the war against disease. Now, as she approached her 711st birthday, city officials wanted to take her from her life work, retire her for age. Fresh from a course in New York In firmary's Women's Medical College and a year of graduate study abroad, Dr. Williams joined the city's laboratory staff in 1895. One year later she made her first important contribution to preventive medicine -- the discovery of a strain of diphtheria bacillus which produced an extremely virulent toxin. It made possible mass production of the anti-diphtheria serum which has nearly banished that dis ease from the world. Dog-bite victims once had to wait ten awful days to know if they had contracted rabies. In 1904, Dr. Williams and an Italian investigator discovered, simultaneously but independently, the bodies in the animal's nerve cells which apparently cause the disease. By devising a quick method of identifying these bodies, Dr. Williams cut diagnostic time from days to a few hours. Up to 1914 New York City's Health Department reported 15,000 cases of trachoma per year. Each year the city spent thousands of dollars on investigation, clinical treatment, deportation of infected aliens. In 1915 this eye disease disappeared from the Health Department's reports after Dr. Williams perfected a method of diagnosis which showed that many suspected cases were not trachoma at all.

Valuable though less spectacular has been Dr. Williams' work in poliomyelitis, meningitis, influenza. Of late years she has been studying the streptococci which cause scarlet fever, erysipelas, puerperal (childbed) fever, septic sore throat. Last week she did not want to stop. New York physicians agreed that her work should not be interrupted. Dr. Williams' famed chief, Dr. Williams Hallock Park, who resisted a retirement move when he reached 70 last December, did not see how he could spare her. Said he: "We have very good bacteriologists in the department, but they haven't the breadth of view of a director."

City officials could not make out a good case against small Dr. Williams' vigor. At 71 her blue eyes are alert as ever. She has just returned from her first long vacation in 39 years.

New York's Mayor LaGuardia has lately popped in on many a city department for an early-morning surprise visit. The Health Department's laboratories, which he visited last week, were the first place he found everyone on time and hard at work. After that dynamic Mayor LaGuardia was inclined to make an exception to the city's age-limit rule, let Assistant Director Williams stay on.

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