Anna Sundström

Anna Sundström (1785 to 1871), born Anna Christina Persdotter in Kymlinge in Spånga, was a Swedish chemist and is often called the first female chemist in Sweden. The daughter of a farmer, she moved to the capital as a young woman to work as a maid, and in 1808 she was employed as housekeeper to Jöns Jacob Berzelius, one of the founders of modern chemistry. In that household she became in practice his assistant and co-worker, and she learned chemistry from the research going on around her. Berzelius wrote that she knew his apparatus and its names so well that he could confidently set her to distil hydrochloric acid. She also ran his laboratory and supervised his students, who affectionately called her strict Anna. Her work with Berzelius ended in 1836, when he married Elisabeth Poppius. The Swedish Chemical Society's division of inorganic chemistry still honours her each year with the Anna Sundström Award for the best Swedish doctoral thesis in inorganic chemistry.