[1][3] Ida paved the way for the hiring of additional female scientists in the NIH and worked alongside other influential women such as Alice Evans, who went on to serve as the first woman president of the Society of American Bacteriologists.

[4] Following her hiring at the NIH, Bengtson helped to discover that the 1917 tetanus outbreak running rampant across the US, could be traced back to a batch of contaminated vaccine scarifiers.

[2] Bengtson's scientific achievement was also in the study of an organism called Clostridium botulinum, which causes a paralytic disease in chicken.

After Bengtson left Rolla in 1931, a new trachoma hospital was built in 1939, and today houses the Rock Mechanics and Explosives Research Center on S&T's campus.

[9] During her short time in Rolla, Bengtson worked with animals and over 1500 human patients to isolate the bacteria causing the debilitating disease.

She slowed the progression of the disease in over 1000 people, and, according to The Kansas City Star, Bengtson “made Rolla the chief American battle front in the war on” trachoma.

[11] Her chapter on the family “Rickettsiaceae” appeared in the sixth edition of the influential Bergey’s Manual of Determinative Bacteriology after her official retirement.