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Physician · Founder of industrial medicine in America · First woman on the Harvard faculty
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Alice Hamilton was born 27 February 1869 in New York City and raised, like her sister Edith, on the Hamilton family's three-block estate in Fort Wayne, the town her grandfather Allen Hamilton had helped found. After Miss Porter's School she studied science in Fort Wayne — including a year of anatomy at the Fort Wayne College of Medicine — and took her medical degree at the University of Michigan in 1893. From 1897 she lived at Jane Addams's Hull House in Chicago and taught pathology at the Woman's Medical School of Northwestern University; out of Hull House she began the investigations — of lead, mercury, benzene, radium, and the other poisons of the new industries — that created the American field of industrial toxicology. She led the Illinois Occupational Diseases Commission's survey in 1910, the first such investigative body in the United States, and from 1911 served as a special investigator for the United States Bureau of Labor. In 1919 Harvard Medical School appointed her assistant professor of industrial medicine: the first woman appointed to the Harvard faculty in any field, on terms that barred her from the faculty club, from football tickets, and from the commencement procession. She served on the League of Nations Health Committee (1924–1930) and wrote the field's handbooks, Industrial Poisons in the United States (1925) and Industrial Toxicology (1934). She retired from Harvard in 1935, still an assistant professor, and died at Hadlyme, Connecticut, on 22 September 1970, aged 101 — three months before Congress passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act.
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- § 06 — people of the record
Sources: American Chemical Society, National Historic Chemical Landmark biography; Science History Institute; Linda Hall Library.