Dorothy Reed Mendenhall

Dorothy Reed Mendenhall (1874 to 1964) was an American physician whose career ran from laboratory pathology to public child health. Born in Columbus, Ohio, she studied at Smith College and then entered the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, one of the first women admitted, graduating in 1900 and serving an internship under William Osler. While a pathology fellow under William Welch in 1901, she compared tissue from tuberculosis patients with tissue from patients with Hodgkin disease and described a large, distinctive cell found only in the latter. The cell, now called the Reed-Sternberg cell, showed that Hodgkin disease was not a form of tuberculosis, and she published the finding in 1902. She then moved to pediatrics, becoming the first resident physician at the Babies Hospital in New York in 1903. After marrying and settling in Madison, Wisconsin, she set up an infant welfare clinic there in 1915, later served the United States Children's Bureau as a medical officer from 1917 to 1936, studied infant mortality in several countries and argued for midwifery. She died in 1964.