Myrtelle May Canavan

Myrtelle May Canavan,, née Moore, studied at the Michigan State College, the University of Michigan and the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. After graduating in 1905 she married a medical colleague, James Francis Canavan

In 1907 she obtained a laboratory post at the Danvers State Hospital, Hawthorne, Massachusetts, where she was influenced towards neuropathology by professor Elmer Ernest Southard (1876-1920). They later published a number of articles on clinicopathological correlations in neurological diseases.

Canavan was a frequent mover. From 1910 she worked as a resident pathologist at the Boston State Hospital, and in 1914 she became pathologist to the Massachusetts Department of Mental Disease. In 1924 she became associate professor of neuropathology at Boston University, two years later she was an instructor in neuropathology at the University of Vermont, and her last appointment was curator of the Warren Anatomical Museum, Harvard medical school, Canavan died from Parkinson's disease.

Obituary in Journal of the American Medical Association, Chicago, 1953, 153(14): 1295.