Pearl Kendrick

I'm Clint Cargill.

October 8th, 1980 marks the death of Dr. Pearl Kendrick, but her life's work still saves the lives of over 6,000 American children and thousands more around the world every year.

Dr. Kendrick perfected the vaccine for pertussis, more commonly known as whooping cough.

Born in Wheaton, Illinois on August 24th, 1890, Pearl Kendrick attended Greenville College in Greenville, Illinois, then transferred to Syracuse to complete her undergraduate degree.

While working as a teacher, she studied bacteriology at Columbia University, then earned her doctorate at Johns Hopkins University.

After graduating, she became an epidemiologist at Michigan's Department of Public Health.

After long days at the lab, Kendrick and her colleague Grace Eldering would tromp through the snow from house to house looking for children suffering from whooping cough, a disease that killed 6,000 children each year in the United States.

When they located a sick child, they had them cough onto a petri dish to take back to the lab.