Infectious Diseases: The Ravages of Strep

When Rebecca Craighill Lancefield was a child around the turn of the century, scarlet fever seemed a dangerous disease that was easy enough to diagnose but difficult to treat. The victim got a raging sore throat, a high fever, and a rash that spread over most of his body and gave the illness its name. But physicians and bacteriologists found that though they could suppress the rash, they could do little else for their patients. Researchers also found that patients who had one bout of scarlet fever might never have another, but if they got the same kind of sore throat again, they might develop heart or kidney disease.

During World War I, tens of thousands of American soldiers became ill with scarlet fever or related strep infections. Mrs. Lancefield, who got her master’s at the time and began working for her doctorate in microbiology at Columbia University, had no trouble finding a problem on which to concentrate. Encouraged by her husband, Geneticist Donald E. Lancefield, she became one of the first bacteriologists to recognize that the streptococci are an appallingly complex group of microbes. She spent a decade in the laboratory, painstakingly classifying different strains of streptococci according to the poisons they produce. By 1928 she was ready to report that the bugs that cause scarlet fever and destroy red blood cells and pave the way for rheumatic fever and heart and kidney damage, could all be identified as coming from a single group that she called beta-hemolytic, group A.

While Dr. Lancefield has worked at the Rockefeller Institute refining her findings, other researchers have learned to describe strep germs by their “Lancefield classification.” That name, though unknown to the general public, has become a byword among bacteriologists and medical researchers who have applied the Lancefield findings to the control of rheumatic fever-and, consequently, to the prevention of countless cases of mitral-valve damage. Dr. Lancefield’s latest work has been devoted to pinning down the kinds of strep, and the nature of their poisons involved in glomerulonephritis-one of the commonest, deadliest and most baffling of kidney diseases (TIME, July 24).

Last week the American Heart Association, meeting in Atlantic City, gave Dr. Rebecca Craighill Lancefield, 69, some belated public recognition: its 1964 Research Achievement Award.