 With Southard and others, she contributed to a monograph series called Waverley Researches in the Pathology of the Feeble-Minded.She is most famous for a paper she co-wrote in 1931 discussing the case of a child who had died at sixteen months and whose brain had a spongy white section.Canavan was the first to identify this degenerative disorder of the central nervous system, which was later named "Canavan Disease."