The National Women's Hall of Fame: Alice Hamilton

1973

Alice Hamilton was born in New York City on 27 February 1869 and raised in Fort Wayne, on the three-block family estate her grandfather Allen Hamilton — who had settled here in 1823 — had built in the middle of the young city. She studied anatomy for a year at the Fort Wayne College of Medicine before taking her medical degree at Michigan, then made herself the founder of industrial toxicology: the physician who walked the lead works, match factories and munitions plants of industrial America and proved, plant by plant, what their poisons were doing to the people inside. In 1919 she became the first woman appointed to the faculty of Harvard University, at its medical school. She received the Albert Lasker Public Service Award in 1947, died in 1970 at the age of 101, and in 1973 was inducted posthumously into the National Women's Hall of Fame at Seneca Falls, in the Hall's first class. Her Fort Wayne childhood, and her sister Edith — the classicist whose Mythology taught Greece and Rome to generations of American schoolchildren — belong to the Women's History and People sections; the ledger entry is the 1973 induction and the career that earned it, with the tie stated exactly: born in New York, raised in Fort Wayne, and formed by the household this city gave her.

Sources:

1. National Women's Hall of Fame, inductee record — Alice Hamilton, inducted 1973 (the Hall's first class).
2. Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame, biography of Alice Hamilton — raised in Fort Wayne; educated in part at the Fort Wayne College of Medicine; first woman on the Harvard faculty; inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973.
3. Hektoen International, "Alice Hamilton: Physician and scientist of the dangerous trades" (2019) — the Lasker Award of 1947 and the Fort Wayne upbringing.