Gladys Dick

Gladys Rowena Henry Dick (December 18, 1881 – August 21, 1963) was an American physician who co-developed an antitoxin and vaccine for scarlet fever with her husband, George F. Dick.

Biography Gladys Rowena Henry was born in Pawnee City, Nebraska in 1881 and earned her B.S. in zoology from the University of Nebraska in 1900. She was a member of the Pi Beta Phi chapter at the University of Nebraska. Because her mother initially objected to Gladys attending medical school, she took graduate classes at Nebraska until 1903, then moved to Baltimore to attend Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Graduating in 1907 with her M.D., she 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. and ultimately won a lawsuit against the Lederle Laboratories in 1930 for "patent infringement and improper toxin manufacture."