William Thompson Sedgwick - Lawrence Experiment Station

Lawrence Experiment Station

Beginning in 1888, Sedgwick was appointed as consulting biologist to the Massachusetts State Board of Health. He directed bacteriological research at the Lawrence Experiment Station and sent his brightest engineering students to work there—including George W. Fuller and Allen Hazen. Even though he was not known for his laboratory research studies, he was responsible, along with George W. Rafter in 1889, for developing the enumeration procedure and apparatus for examining microscopic organisms in surface water bodies. The Sedgwick-Rafter counting cell is still in use today.

The Lawrence Experiment Station annual reports highlighted Sedgwick’s role as an epidemiologist. “In epidemiology, Sedgwick played a more direct and personal role and he was, indeed, the first scientific American epidemiologist.” Sedgwick used the annual report covering the work done in 1891 as a vehicle to publish his epidemiological studies of typhoid fever. “In the Annual Report of the State Board of Health of Massachusetts for 1892, Sedgwick presented studies on typhoid fever epidemics at Lowell and Lawrence, at Springfield and at Bondsville, which were classics in the field and which make this one of the most outstanding volumes in the history of epidemiology.”