May Ayres

May Ayres Burgess was an American writer and researcher born in 1888 and died in 1953. Records connected with her published work show her writing on school health, reading measurement, and nursing economics, often bringing a statistical approach to social questions. Her books include Health Work in the Public Schools, Healthful Schools, The Measurement of Silent Reading, and Nurses, Patients, and Pocketbooks.

Sources available online also connect her with Columbia University and with research work for the Russell Sage Foundation. During the 1910s and 1920s, her career seems to have crossed several fields at once: education, public health, and hospital administration. That mix helps explain why her books feel both analytical and strongly practical.

She is a good example of an early twentieth-century author whose writing was aimed less at literary fame than at improving public institutions. Even now, her titles suggest a steady interest in how schools and hospitals could work better for the people who depended on them.