Margaret Anderson (indexer)

Margaret Dampier Anderson (née Whetham; 1900–1997) was a British biochemist and scientific indexer. She published four scientific articles in the 1920s before marrying in 1927 and began indexing books beginning in 1960.

Life

Born on 21 April 1900, Margaret Whetham attended University College, Exeter and then earned her M.A. from Newnham College, Cambridge in 1926. While in graduate school, she worked with Marjory Stephenson including work on the washed suspension technique, which had originated with Louis Pasteur, for extracting enzymes from bacteria. Whetham co-authored four scientific papers with Stephenson and held the Old Students Jubilee Research Fellowship in 1926–27. She married Dr. Alan Bruce Anderson, a clinical pathologist, on 12 September 1927.^[1]

Work

She abstracted scientific articles for several years before beginning to work as a freelance scientific indexer in 1960, creating indexes for 567 books over her career. Anderson joined the Society of Indexers two years later and served as its treasurer, membership secretary, member of the board of assessors, and vice-president over the next several decades. She was awarded the Wheatley Medal by the Society in 1975 for her index to Copy-editing: The Cambridge Handbook.^[1] Eight years later, the Society presented her with its Carey Award for "outstanding services to indexing".^[2]

Notes

References

Haines, Catherine M. C. (2001). International Women in Science: A Biographical Dictionary to 1950. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-57607-090-1.