Alice Hamilton: the first woman on Harvard's faculty, raised on the same estate

1869-1970

The second sister: Alice Hamilton was born on 27 February 1869 in New York City, the second of Montgomery and Gertrude Hamilton's daughters, and like Edith she was raised in Fort Wayne, in the sheltered, book-filled world of the family estate, three blocks of downtown ground her grandfather Allen Hamilton, an Irish immigrant who arrived in 1823, had assembled. The sisters' formation was the same: home schooling, languages, the expectation that a Hamilton daughter would be educated like a son and then do something with it. Alice's something was medicine, and her first medical study was done in Fort Wayne itself, a year of anatomy at the Fort Wayne College of Medicine, before she took her medical degree at the University of Michigan in 1893 and studied further in Germany, travelling there with Edith in 1895.

Hull House and the dangerous trades: From 1897 Alice Hamilton lived at Hull House, Jane Addams's settlement house in Chicago, and there, walking the industrial neighborhoods around her, she found the subject that did not yet have a name. Workers were being poisoned by their trades: lead in the paint and battery works, phosphorus, carbon monoxide, the dusts and fumes of a hundred processes, and almost nobody was counting. Hamilton counted. She became the pioneer of industrial medicine in the United States, inspecting factories, tracing illnesses back to the shop floor, and writing the field into existence, work she summed up late in life in her autobiography, Exploring the Dangerous Trades (1943).

The Harvard first: In 1919 Harvard Medical School appointed her to its faculty, the first woman appointed at Harvard, an appointment the university hedged with the restrictions of the time and which she accepted on her own terms, keeping her half-year for the factory investigations that were her real laboratory. She lived to one hundred and one, dying on 22 September 1970, long enough to see occupational health become a profession. In 2000 Fort Wayne put the sisters in bronze: statues of Alice, Edith and their cousin Agnes Hamilton stand in Headwaters Park, a short walk from the ground the family once owned. Her full entry stands in the people record. This section carries her because the first woman at Harvard was formed, as directly as the record can show a formation, in a Fort Wayne house where girls were taught Greek and then expected to use it.

Sources:

1. Barbara Sicherman, Alice Hamilton: A Life in Letters (1984), as carried in the Indiana Magazine of History and Fort Wayne Museum of Art accounts of the Hamilton family (the Fort Wayne childhood; the Fort Wayne College of Medicine year; Hull House; the Harvard appointment as the university's first woman faculty member).
2. Fort Wayne Museum of Art, "What We're Reading: The Fort Wayne Hamilton Family" (the estate; the sisters and cousins; the Headwaters Park statues of 2000).