Louise Pearce earned her MD from Johns Hopkins in 1912, graduating third in her class. In 1913, she joined the Rockefeller Institute as its first woman researcher. Pearce is best known for her work on African sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis). In the 1920s, she traveled to the Belgian Congo to test treatments for the disease and helped establish the effectiveness of tryparsamide, a drug that became the standard treatment for sleeping sickness for decades. Her work saved countless lives and represented a major advance in tropical medicine. Louise Pearce was a member of Heterodoxy, a feminist society in Greenwich Village, New York City, which paved the way for modern feminism.
