Gladys Dick

Who was Gladys Dick?

Gladys Rowena Henry Dick was an American physician who co-developed a vaccine for scarlet fever with her husband, George F. Dick.

Dick was born in Pawnee City, Nebraska in 1881 and earned her B.S. in zoology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1900. Because her mother initially objected to Dick attending medical school, Dick took graduate classes at Nebraska until 1903 when she then moved to Baltimore to attend Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She graduated in 1907 with her M.D. then trained for a year at the University of Berlin. Dick's years at Johns Hopkins and Berlin "marked her introduction to biomedical research" and provided opportunities to study experimental cardiac surgery and blood chemistry with Harvey Cushing, W.G. MacCallum, and Milton Winternitz.

Dick moved to Chicago in 1911 and contracted scarlet fever while working at Children's Memorial Hospital. After recovering, she took a research position at the University of Chicago, where she studied kidney pathochemistry with H. Gideon Wells and the etiology of scarlet fever with her future husband, George F. Dick. After they married in 1914, Dick served as a pathologist at Evanston Hospital and later joined her husband at the John R. McCormick Institute for Infectious Diseases. She also served as a bacteriologist for the United States Public Health Service and worked at St. Luke's Hospital.