Myrtelle Canavan

Myrtelle Canavan (1879 to 1953) was an American physician and medical researcher, one of the first women to work as a pathologist. She studied at Michigan State Agricultural College, the University of Michigan and the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania, where she took her M.D. in 1905. Drawn to neuropathology by her mentor Elmer Ernest Southard at Danvers State Hospital, she became resident pathologist at Boston State Hospital, pathologist to the Massachusetts Department of Mental Diseases, and later an associate professor of neuropathology at Boston University. From 1920 until she retired in 1945 she also served as curator of the Warren Anatomical Museum at Harvard Medical School, adding more than 1,500 specimens, though her official title stayed assistant curator because of objections to a woman heading the museum. Her research covered diseases of the nervous system, and in 1931 she co-wrote the paper describing the degenerative brain disorder that now bears her name, Canavan disease. She also trained the neuropathologist Louise Eisenhardt.