Medicine: Woman of the Year

When Upton Sinclair was living in Mary McDowell’s stockyards settlement house in Chicago and raking up the muck for his novel The Jungle, a trim little (5 ft. 4 in.) woman doctor named Alice Hamilton was living only five miles away in Hull House. Indiana-bred, raised in ease, and educated at Miss Porter’s famed school at Farmington, Conn., Alice Hamilton was working at the turn of the century as a bacteriologist by day but did settlement work by night and on weekends. Thus she met countless victims of industrial hazards and eventually became the founder of industrial medicine in the U.S.

When Dr. Hamilton started out, the A.M.A. had never held a meeting on industrial medicine, and technical papers on it by U.S. doctors were rare (though European work on it filled volumes). There were safeguards of sorts against physical accidents, but for a workman who spent years absorbing a slow but deadly poison, there was little thought. Dr. Hamilton had heard of men choked by carbon monoxide in the steel mills, of men palsied by white lead poisoning, of others disabled by arsenic and cyanides, of men with the “bends.” To Alice Hamilton’s socialist conscience, all this was outrageous.

Down the Mines. In 1910 she got her chance to do something about it: Illinois’ Governor Charles Deneen appointed her to a state commission to investigate “occupational diseases.” Her commission did not know where to begin because there was not even an official list of dangerous occupations, so Dr. Hamilton compiled it as she went from factory to factory. She could not demand admittance, but most managers let her in. The woman doctor brashly invaded the man’s world, plowed through unventilated, fume-filled plant after plant. She took air samples, studied the ubiquitous dusts, noted how men did their jobs.

Before the Illinois work was finished, the Federal Government asked Dr. Hamilton to do a similar job. This kept her roving through mine, mill and smelter for a dozen years. She combatted the effects of such anciently known poisons as mercury, used by hatters in matting felt and a frequent cause of brain damage (hence, some say, the expression “mad as a hatter”). And she fought ultramodern lethal concoctions—TNT, aniline dyes, picric acid, which stained its workers so yellow that they were dubbed “canaries.” She campaigned for ventilation, antitoxic rinses, safeguards of all kinds.

Back to Boston. Spinster Hamilton, long devoted to the causes of woman suffrage and of birth control for the masses, once bitterly chided Boston for opposing woman suffrage longer than Chicago, women doctors longer than New Orleans. But it was from Harvard’s medical faculty that she got her greatest honor: as early as 1919 Harvard named her assistant professor in industrial medicine. Crusader Hamilton saw U.S. industry increasingly accept the fact that its workers’ health was inseparable from an evergrowing productivity, saw her field broadened beyond the now obvious hazards of poison to include psychological hazards as well.

Now a spry 87 and long retired, Dr. Hamilton is remembered by U.S. medicine. Last week she made a return trip to anti-feminist Boston to gather a little more belated recognition of work that has saved the health and lives of thousands. Her colleagues in the American Medical Women’s Association voted her New England’s “woman of the year” in medicine.