Martha Wollstein

Who was Martha Wollstein?

Martha Wollstein was an American physician. Wollstein was born in New York to a German Jewish family.

She was educated at the Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary, which became part of the Cornell University Medical School in 1909. There she studied with Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi, with whom she would later publish her first paper in 1902, on a myosarcoma of the uterus. After graduating in 1890, Wollstein joined the Babies Hospital in New York, where she became a pathologist in 1892. Her work there included research on infant diarrhea, malaria, tuberculosis, and typhoid fever. In 1904, she was invited by Simon Flexner to join the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research as an assistant researcher, though she continued to work at the Babies Hospital even after this. At the Rockefeller Institute she did experimental work on polio, studied pneumonia, and helped to develop an antimeningitis serum. In a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1918, she made an important contribution to the study of mumps, by indicating that the disease could be viral in nature.