Alice Hamilton

She was born in Manhattan on February 27, 1869 and raised on a Hamilton family compound in Fort Wayne, Indiana that ran to three houses across three blocks. Her father had been to Princeton and Harvard Law and had studied in Germany, where he met her mother, a sugar importer's daughter. Her sister Edith became the classicist whose Mythology schoolchildren still read. Alice took science from a Fort Wayne high school teacher, spent a year on anatomy at the local college of medicine, and entered the University of Michigan Medical School in 1892, graduating the next year. Then Leipzig and Munich, where the universities let her in and treated her as an intruder, and Berlin, which refused her outright, and Johns Hopkins.

In 1897 she took a pathology professorship at Northwestern's Woman's Medical School and moved into Hull House, where she stayed 22 years and became Jane Addams's physician. The neighborhood was her data. Appointed to the Illinois Commission on Occupational Diseases in 1910, she found more than 70 industrial processes poisoning workers with lead. The method she invented for it she called shoe-leather epidemiology: walk into the plant, interview the men, count the diagnosed cases, publish. She went on to carbon monoxide in steel mills, mercury among hatters, dead fingers among Indiana limestone cutters, tuberculosis in the granite sheds of Quincy and Barre, and TNT in a New Jersey munitions plant, where changing and washing the work clothes each shift ended the outbreak. Industrial Poisons in the United States, in 1925, was the first American textbook on any of it.

Harvard hired her in January 1919 as an assistant professor, the first woman on its faculty in any field. The New York Tribune ran the headline "A Woman on Harvard Faculty — The Last Citadel Has Fallen." Her own line was drier: she was the first appointed, not the first who should have been. In 16 years she was never promoted, held nothing but three-year appointments, could not enter the Harvard Union or the Faculty Club, drew no football tickets, and was not permitted to walk in commencement. The larger defeat came in 1925, when she testified against tetraethyl lead in gasoline. She was then seated on the Surgeon General's panel as the only scientist among seven industry men, given seven months, and outvoted. The EPA later estimated that 68 million American children took high lead exposure from leaded fuel.

She retired to Hadlyme, Connecticut in 1935, kept the emerita title, advised the Labor Department, and wrote her autobiography, Exploring the Dangerous Trades, in 1943. Her positions on civil liberties, peace and birth control had critics filing her as a radical and a subversive: she had gone to the women's peace congress at The Hague in 1915 and to Nazi Germany in 1933, publishing what she saw there in the New York Times. In 1947 she became the first woman to take the Lasker Public Service Award. She died of a stroke at home on September 22, 1970, aged 101, and is buried at Cove Cemetery. Within three months Congress passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act.

Alice Hamilton's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Survey for the Illinois Commission on Occupational Diseases discovery
  Identified more than 70 industrial processes exposing workers to lead 1910
• Federal studies of white lead and lead oxide manufacture discovery
  Done for the Bureau of Labor Statistics and treated as a landmark 1911
• Industrial Poisons in the United States book
  The first American textbook on the subject 1925
• Industrial Toxicology book
  Revised in 1949 with Harriet Hardy 1934
• Exploring the Dangerous Trades book
  Her autobiography, written at 74 1943
• The Youth Who Are Hitler's Strength article
  Published in the New York Times after she visited Nazi Germany 1933

• 1893 aged ~24 Graduates from the University of Michigan Medical School
• 1897 aged ~28 Moves into Hull House and starts investigating the neighborhood's illnesses She stayed a full-time resident until 1919 and returned every spring after.
• 1910 aged ~41 Runs the Illinois survey that maps industrial lead poisoning
• 1915 aged ~46 Sails with Jane Addams to the International Congress of Women at The Hague
• January 1919 aged 49 Becomes the first woman on the Harvard faculty Assistant professor in a new Department of Industrial Medicine. She was never promoted.
• 1925 aged ~56 Testifies against leaded gasoline and is outvoted on the review panel She was the only scientist among seven industry men.
• 1935 aged ~66 Retires from Harvard and advises the Division of Labor Standards
• 1947 aged ~78 First woman to receive the Albert Lasker Public Service Award
• September 22, 1970 aged 101 Dies at 101 at Hadlyme, three months before the Occupational Safety and Health Act

• Jane Addams 1860–1935
  Social worker and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who founded Hull House and the settlement house movement. housemate and patient at Hull House
• Rachel Carson 1907–1964
  Marine biologist whose book Silent Spring launched the modern environmental movement. took the same argument to pesticides
• Frances Perkins 1880–1965
  First woman in a presidential cabinet and labor secretary who helped create Social Security, minimum-wage, and workplace protections. wrote her findings into federal labor policy
• Upton Sinclair 1878–1968
  Novelist whose expose of Chicago meatpacking spurred federal food and drug inspection laws. exposed the same industries in fiction
• Harvey Washington Wiley 1844–1930
  Chemist whose adulteration studies produced the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the agency that became the FDA. built the federal machinery for chemical regulation
• Ralph Nader b. 1934
  Consumer advocate whose auto-safety campaign produced federal vehicle standards and a public-interest lobbying network. inherited the workplace-safety fight