LAUSR

Most of the pathologists featured in the Founders of Pediatric Pathology series go back only 1 or 2 pediatric pathology ‘‘generations.’’ Depending upon our ages, they either trained us or trained our mentors. Many were members of the Pediatric Pathology Club that formed in 1965 and preceded the formation of the Pediatric Pathology Society and the Society for Pediatric Pathology. One of us (JRW) recently published a Founders of Pediatric Pathology paper on Denver Children’s Hospital pathologist Ward Burdick, whose career was dramatically different than that of those described above; Burdick did not train any pediatric pathologists but was 1 of 2 cofounders of the American Society of Clinical Pathologists, which played a critical role in establishing hospital-based practice of pathology in North America. In the following article, we highlight the career of another notable pediatric pathologist who has been forgotten by our specialty and who breaks the typical mold. While not training any pediatric pathologists, Martha Wollstein (Figure 1) was almost certainly the first fully specialized pediatric perinatal pathologist practicing exclusively in a North American children’s hospital. Not only was Wollstein a pioneer pediatric pathologist, she was also a pioneer female pathologist, working during roughly the same time period as Maude Abbott at McGill. However, unlike Abbott, Wollstein was the pathologist of record at a hospital (Babies Hospital in New York City) and was allowed to practice the full scope of hospital pathology, whereas Abbott’s practice was limited to functioning as the curator of the McGill Medical Museum. Abbott, who became an internationally recognized expert on congenital heart disease, was never even allowed hospital privileges at any McGill hospital because she was a woman, and she was never able to perform autopsies or any other clinical work in Montreal. Wollstein, whose scope of practice at Babies’ Hospital included anatomical pathology, microbiology, hematology, and some chemistry, also worked at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and was, for part of her career, a clinician–scientist publishing important research on pediatric and infectious diseases; however, institutional discrimination eventually led her to drop this prestigious second affiliation and to focus only on her clinical work at Babies Hospital. In this paper, we will review the remarkable career of Martha Wollstein and briefly touch on the pervasive discrimination faced by female physicians practicing in the late 19th and early 20th century. Wollstein, sensitive to the issues of discrimination, celebrated the accomplishments of women in medicine by writing a paper on this topic for the Woman’s Medical Journal in 1908, and in this paper, she briefly mentions Maude Abbott.