Myrtelle Canavan

Myrtelle May Moore Canavan (June 24, 1879 – August 4, 1953) was an American physician and medical researcher. She was one of the first female pathologists and is best known for publishing a description of Canavan disease in 1931.

Life and career Born in Greenbush Township, near St. Johns, Michigan, Canavan studied at (Michigan) State Agricultural College (now Michigan State University), the University of Michigan Medical School, and Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania, from which she received her M.D. in 1905.

In 1905 she married Dr. James F. Canavan. In 1910 she became resident pathologist at Boston State Hospital and in 1914 was appointed pathologist to the Massachusetts Department of Mental Diseases. She was also an instructor of neuropathology at the University of Vermont. However, her official title was "assistant curator" because of objections to a woman heading the museum, and she was never appointed to the Harvard faculty. And in 1925 she published Elmer Ernest Southard and His Parents: A Brain Study, a report on her examination of the brains of her mentor and his parents. She also trained neuropathologist Louise Eisenhardt, who became a renowned expert in diagnosing brain tumors. In 1959 she was credited with training 70% of the neurosurgeons then certified.

She had a particular interest in the neuropathology of mental illness. With Southard and others, she contributed to a monograph series called Waverley Researches in the Pathology of the Feeble-Minded.

She is most famous for a paper she co-wrote in 1931 discussing the case of a child who had died at sixteen months and whose brain had a spongy white section. Canavan was the first to identify this degenerative disorder of the central nervous system, which was later named "Canavan Disease."