Menacanthus clara, Southmayd Ludlow, 1852

Troyo, Adriana, González-Sequeira, María Paula, Aguirre-Salazar, Mónica, Cambronero-Ortíz, Ian, Chaves-González, Luis Enrique, Mejías-Alpízar, María José, Alvarado-Molina, Kendall, Calderón-Arguedas, Ólger & Rojas-Araya, Diana, 2022, Acknowledging extraordinary women in the history of medical entomology, Parasites & Vectors (114) 15 (1), pp. 1-27 : 2-4

Clara Southmayd Ludlow

Clara Southmayd Ludlow was born in 1852 in Pennsylvania, USA [ 26]. At first, she showed interest in music and graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music in 1879; later, she became interested in science [ 26]. From 1897 to 1900, she attended the Mississippi Agricultural and Mechanical College, where her interest in mosquitoes began under the tutelage of George Herrick, a biology professor [ 26]. It was George Herrick who first introduced her to medical entomology, working in a yellow fever (YF) laboratory [ 27]. At the Mississippi Agricultural and Mechanical College, she subsequently obtained a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree in agriculture and then a Master of Science (M.Sc.) in botany [ 27]. After graduating in 1901, she traveled to visit her brother, an officer working with the US Army Forces in the Philippines. Here, she met Dr. William Calvert, who was amazed by her interest in mosquitoes and by her work at Herrick’s YF laboratory and consequently convinced Colonel B.F. Pope to issue an order that allowed medical officers to collect mosquito specimens and send them to Manila for further examination by Dr. Ludlow [ 27]. She returned to the USA that same year, and in 1904 she moved to Washington DC, and started working at the Army Medical Museum [ 28]. Some years later, in 1908, she received her Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree from George Washington University [ 26]. At this institution, not only was she a student, but also an instructor of histology and embryology until 1911 [ 28]. In 1920, Dr. Ludlow became the chief entomologist at the Army Medical Museum (now National Museum of Health and Medicine), a position she held until her death [29].

Dr. Ludlow became an expert in mosquito taxonomy and published around 53 scientific papers, 20 of which, all on mosquitoes, were published during the time she was at George Washington University. Some of her most relevant work focuses on the description of mosquito species. In 1905, she described the morphology and the differences between males and females of Taeniorhynchus sierrensis (now in the genus Aedes ), collected from three different rivers throughout the USA [ 30]. She also described Aedes albopictus as Stegomyia scutellaris var. samarensis , not knowing that Frederick A. A. Skuse had already published a paper describing it as Culex albopictus [ 31]. However, the presence of this mosquito in the Hawaii islands was confirmed because of Dr. Ludlow’s studies [ 31]. She also described Anopheles perplexens in Pennsylvania [ 28] and worked on mosquitoes from the North and West Indies and the Philippine Islands, where she described those mosquitoes that serve as disease vectors, as well as the life-cycles and breeding preferences of different Culicinae and Anophelinae mosquitoes [ 32].

Dr. Ludlow was honored by her peers by becoming the first non-physician and woman member of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene ( ASTMH) in 1908. In 2016, the ASTMH council voted in favor of creating a medal named after an iconic leader in tropical medicine and created the “Clara Southmayd Ludlow Medal ” in recognition of her work.

Dr. Clara Ludlow died of cancer in the USA in 1924

[ 26].