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This timeline is a brief overview of her life, showcasing some of her milestones and accomplishments. The sections below further describe her journey through each stage of her life and explain what she faced as she advanced in her field as a female bacteriologist.
Early Life
Early Life
Ida Albertina Bengtson was born on the 17th of January, 1881, in Harvard, Nebraska, to Swedish immigrants. Even as a child, she was raised in a period when women were not given much of a chance to access higher education and even less to pursue a career in scientific research. Her subsequent works in bacteriology are particularly important as she has not entered into the science world through a standard scientific journey (National Institutes of Health [date unknown]).
Education and Changing Career Path
Education and Changing Career Path
Bengtson studied at the University of Nebraska, where she graduated in 1903, having been trained in mathematics and languages and not in biology. Upon graduation, she relocated to Washington, D.C., where she was a cataloguer at the U.S. Geological Survey library. Later biographical sources claim that this is when her life was changed: having compared her work with that of her friend in the field of science, she resolved to become a scientific researcher herself. She returned to school and enrolled at the University of Chicago, where she pursued a degree in bacteriology with supporting subjects in chemistry and physiology. She earned her M.S. in 1913 and completed her Ph.D. in 1919 (National Institutes of Health [date unknown]).
Entry into Scientific Research
Entry into Scientific Research
Bengtson already started developing a career in the field of public health science before she completed her doctorate. She was employed in the Chicago Department of Health as a bacteriologist in 1915. One year later, in 1916, she was recruited by George McCoy at the Hygienic Laboratory of the U.S. Public Health Service, which was to become the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It was the first in history: Bengtson was the first woman to be employed as a bacteriologist in the Hygienic Laboratory. Her appointment was a significant milestone in her life and in the general representation of women in American biomedical research. (National Institutes of Health [date unknown]).
Scientific Career and Professional Life
Scientific Career and Professional Life
Bengtson had spent approximately thirty years researching bacteria and infectious diseases in the U.S. Public Health Service. It was through her scientific career that she became involved with some of the most significant disease issues of the early twentieth century, such as tetanus, botulism, typhus, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Q fever and trachoma. Later in 1917, she achieved an early breakthrough by assisting in the connection of an outbreak of tetanus with contaminated vaccine scarifiers. In her later career, she also researched rickettsial diseases and assisted in developing with a complement fixation test used to identify and differentiate diseases like endemic typhus, epidemic typhus, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and Q fever (National Institutes of Health [date unknown]).
Part of Bengtson's career brought her out of the laboratory environment. In the early 1920s, she was also dispatched to Rolla, Missouri, where she conducted a study on trachoma, an infectious eye disease that left people blind without preventive measures. Her work there indicates thatbacteriology in this era was closely related not only to laboratory science, but also to public health service and control of disease in communities afflicted (National Library of Medicine 2012).
Later Years and Legacy
Later Years and Legacy
Bengtson worked within the Public Health Service until 1946, where she postponed retirement due to shortages of scientific manpower during World War II. She died in 1952 (Wikipedia 2025). In her last years as a bacteriologist, she became a respected figure and made significant contributions to the study of infectious diseases. However, her name is not well known at present, even though her work has a magnitude of scientific significance. Her life story is indicative of the stubbornness women needed to pursue science in the early twentieth century, as well as the fact that many of their contributions are not preserved in institutional memory but are remembered by the people who created them.
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