Andromachi Papanikolaou

Andromachi "Mary" Mavrogeni Papanikolaou (c. 1890 – 13 October 1982) was a Greek laboratory technician and the wife of Georgios Papanikolaou, the Greek pathologist who independently invented the pap test. For 21 years, Mary Papanikolaou volunteered to have her cervix sampled and smeared by her husband to help with his efforts to create the pap test, which has been shown to reduce cervical cancer deaths by up to 80 percent.

Born Andromachi Mavrogeni, Papanikolaou was the descendant of the Phanariote Mavrogenis family, which made history fighting against the Ottomans in the Greek War of Independence. She received a good education, could speak French and could play the piano. She met her husband Georgios on a ferry boat journey to Athens, and he fell in love with her charming personality. Papanikolaou eloped with her husband shortly after he obtained his PhD in zoology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1910. After returning to Greece following the death of Georgios' mother, the couple immigrated to New York City on 9 October 1913. Neither Papanikolaou nor her husband spoke English, and they had between them only $250, the amount then required to enter the U.S. Papanikolaou took a job at Gimbel's Department Store as a seamstress, sewing buttons for $5 per week. Her husband took a series of odd jobs before obtaining a position at New York Hospital's Pathology Department and Cornell University Medical College's Anatomy Department, where Papanikolaou joined him as an unpaid technician.