Scientist of the Day - Alice Hamilton
U.S. postage stamp, portrait of Alice Hamilton, 1995, National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution (postalmuseum.si.edu)
Alice Hamilton, an American physician, medical researcher, and social reformer, was born Feb. 27, 1869, in New York City. She grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in a well-to-do family with 3 sisters and a brother, all of whom excelled in their chosen professions.
Alice attended Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Conn., which I find of personal interest, since my parents lived right next to the school and we held their 50th wedding anniversary in the school's banquet room. Alice Hamilton is the first woman scientist I have run across who went there. She graduated in 1888. Her sister, Edith Hamilton, an acclaimed author of books on Greek and Roman mythology, had graduated three years earlier.
Portrait of Alice Hamilton, age 24, just graduated from medical school, photograph,1893 (connecticuthistory.org)
Alice chose medicine as a way to be of service to society, and she attended medical school at the University of Michigan, receiving her degree in 1893. She interned in several hospitals, decided she would rather be a research scientist than a clinical physician, and returned to school to study pathology, at Michigan and Johns Hopkins. She then accepted a position at the Northwestern Medical School for Women. More significantly, she also accepted an offer to work at and live in Hull House, Chicago’s first settlement house.
Hull House, the settlement house in Chicago where Alice Hamilton lived and worked, 1897-1919, postcard, 1916 (Wikimedia commons)
The settlement house movement was very popular from 1890 to 1920, in both Europe and the United States. Places like Hull House served the immigrant community by providing them with housing and social and medical care, the key proviso being that the staff had to live there, in the community they served. Alice lived at Hull House for 22 years (third image).
The focus of her research was occupational illness, diseases that arose with the introduction of all sorts of chemicals into the industrial environment, such as lead, mercury, carbon tetrachloride, benzene, aniline dyes, even radium. She read everything ever written on the subject, visited industrial plants all around the country, wrote numerous articles in technical journals, and became so renowned for her pioneering studies that she was hired by Harvard Medical School in 1919, becoming the first woman professor at Harvard, in any field.
Title page, Industrial Toxicology, by Alice Hamilton, 2nd ed., ca 1934 (Linda Hall Library)
Hamilton wrote two influential handbooks on occupational disease, Industrial Poisons in the United States (1925), and Industrial Toxicology, published in 1934. We do not have the first book, but we do have a copy of the second edition of Industrial Toxicology, which is undated, but must have been issued shortly after the first, for our copy was presented by a donor to the Kansas City Public Library in 1936 and then transferred to us in 1949.
Beginning of section on the toxic effects of cadmium, Industrial Toxicology, by Alice Hamilton, 2nd ed., p. 104, ca 1934 (Linda Hall Library)
I sat down with our copy of Industrial Toxicology and expected to find it opaque to a non-physician. Instead, it was not only readable, it was enthralling (and, of course, appalling, in its descriptions of industrial afflictions). It is organized by element or compound, beginning with mineral acids, lead, mercury, and a dozen other metals, then coal-tar derivatives, petroleum derivatives, mineral oils, and concluding with x-rays and radioactive substances. We show the beginning of the discussion of the deleterious effects of cadmium (fifth image). Hamilton carefully distinguished between effects caused by ingestion of poisons and those resulting from inspiration, which are usually much worse. One of the underlying themes of the book is that dust is the great enemy of plant workers – get rid of the dust, and you eliminate 90% of all industrial toxins. Cases are cited by the hundreds. Hamilton includes a numbered bibliography of 655 case studies, and I think every one of them is cited by number in the text, which manages to stay readable despite this. The book is an amazing tour de force.
Portrait of Alice Hamilton, age 78, chalk and charcoal on paper, by Samuel Johnson Woolf, 1947, National Portrait Gallery (npg.si.edu)
Hamilton retired in 1935 from Harvard, spent more time at Hull House, and then retired to Hadlyme, Conn., where she died on Sept. 22, 1970, at the age of 101. She was honored with a U.S. postage stamp in 1995 (first image). She is fortunate to have left behind two exquisite portraits, a photograph taken when she graduated from medical school at the age of 24 (second image), and a charcoal sketch made when she was 78, which is in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. (last image).
William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor emeritus, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Comments or corrections are welcome; please direct to ashworthw@umkc.edu.
