Alice Hamilton's education and experiences at Hull House made her a strong, scientifically-minded woman determined to protect the working class and prevent the use of unsafe chemicals in industry.
Early Life and Education
Alice Hamilton was born in 1869 in Manhattan, New York and raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She earned a medical degree from the University of Michigan in 1893. After gaining clinical experience, Hamilton realized she did not want to be a practicing doctor. After returning to school in 1895 to study bacteriology, Hamilton developed an interest in public health.
"I chose medicine not because I was scientifically-minded, for I was deeply ignorant of science. I chose it because as a doctor I could go anywhere I pleased — to far-off lands or to city slums — and be quite sure I could be of use anywhere.” |
"A Miracle Cure" (Bentley Historical Library, 2017)
While Hamilton was not unique for studying medicine as a woman, sexism still existed in the field. The University of Michigan tolerated women, but while abroad in Germany, Hamilton was not allowed to study in Berlin and faced prejudice in Leipzig and Munich.
“This was by no means an easy task for a woman of her generation. The movement for formal admission of women to American graduate schools was just beginning."
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Audio transcript: "I worked there with German students who were very considerate but very curious about a woman wanting it. Their question would always be, ‘But who will darn the stockings if women are going to be bacteriologists?’ They gave me the impression that the whole sex in Germany was devoted to darning stockings. From there, I guess I came home.”
- Alice Hamilton in an interview with Paul Ehrlich (Harvard School of Public Health, 1963)
Social Reform
From 1897 to 1919, Alice Hamilton worked at Hull House in Chicago, the first major settlement house in America that provided services for immigrants acclimating to American society. Hamilton was heavily influenced by its founder, Jane Addams, and sympathized with its underprivileged residents. Consequently, she learned about the dangers that working immigrants faced.
I should never have taken up the cause of the working class had I not lived at Hull House and learned much from Jane Addams, Florence Kelley... and others." "Alice Hamilton 1988 NIOSH" (YouTube)
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[Hamilton's] ability to see the world from the perspective of the least powerful - and her sense of solidarity with those struggling within the dominant economic and social order - was directly tied to her learnings at the Hull House." |
The industrial workers of America, who were either too poor or too ethnic to rouse the sympathy of a goods-hungry public, were in desperate need of someone with the scientific rigor... and the investigative gumption to tread where others wouldn’t in search of medical answers... In 1910, they got their someone in the form of a 40 year old doctor... who would thereafter earn a world reputation as the foremost expert on the manufacturing processes and chemicals that harm industrial workers."
- Dale Debakcsy in "Lead, TNT, And Rayon: Dr. Alice Hamilton’s Battle Against Industrial Poisons" (2019)