What do growing up on a farm with three brothers, a love of the outdoors, a passion for science, and a drive to achieve what most girls could not have in common? They are factors that combined to lead Dr. Mary E. (Lausch) Wilson to defy the defined societal norms of her generation’s upbringing and blaze a trail for female doctors. Mary started life in 1942 as a city girl in Indianapolis. In 1951, when she was in third grade, the Lausch family moved to Howard County to take over the operation of the Kurtz family farm. Mary quickly became a country girl, exploring the woods, helping with harvest, and participating in 4-H. Schools at the time did not allow girls to play competitive sports, so she became a cheerleader, and sang and played the flute. After graduating from Northwestern High School in 1960, Mary headed to Indiana University, earning a degree in French and English. After three years of teaching in public schools in Madison, Wisconsin, where she also did graduate work in English literature, Mary remembers, she was reading in the rare books library when she had an epiphany: What she really wanted was to go to medical school. The next day, she called the University of Wisconsin Medical School to inquire about applying. Like many other women in the 1960s, she says, “I was told that I was not a good candidate, wasn’t serious, and would be taking the place of a man.” Persistence paid off; the next year, she was accepted into the medical school, one of eight women in a class of 104.

During a summer rotation at the Mallory Institute of Pathology in Boston in 1969, Mary fell in love with the city and returned for training in internal medicine and infectious diseases. While doing clinical work in Haiti, she started to grapple with the question of what determines where specific infectious diseases occur and how and why they move. Since then, she has been a trailblazer in the field, recognized internationally as an expert in global health and a pioneer with her work on the geography of infectious diseases, the role of travel in their spread, and on the relationship of global environmental change and infectious disease. Mary worked at Mount Auburn Hospital, becoming the Chief of Infectious Diseases while teaching at Harvard University, and served on national and international panels on infectious disease and immunization. She authored “A World Guide to Infections: Diseases, Distribution, Diagnosis” in 1991, at the time the first and foremost book on the topic. Her second book, “Antibiotics: What Everyone Needs to Know,” came out in 2019.

Mary and her husband of 50 years love to travel and remain active in the field of global health. Today she is a clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine and adjunct professor in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her advice for women and girls today? “Go for it. If something interests you, pursue it. There are so many options today.” Options that women like Dr. Mary E. Wilson helped make possible.