About

Many of the first laws and regulations passed to improve the health of workers were the direct result of the work of one dedicated and talented woman, Alice Hamilton, MD. Born into a prominent family in Indiana, Dr. Hamilton graduated from medical school at the University of Michigan in 1893. After accepting a teaching position at the Women’s Medical School of Northwestern University in 1897, she moved into Jane Addams’ Hull House in Chicago, where she lived with immigrants and the poor.

As she provided medical care, she came to realize that jobs were a major source of injury and illness for workers and their families. For example, men who worked with asbestos or lead exposed their families through the work clothing they brought home to be washed. There she opened a well-baby clinic for poor families in the local settlement house neighborhood. As she acquainted herself with the families, she learned of their pains, strange deaths, lead palsy, “wrist drop,” and the high numbers of widowed women. Encouraged by the reformers of Hull House, she began to apply her medical knowledge to these social problems and thus began her scientific inquiry into occupational health, for which she became known.

Dr. Hamilton quickly realized that while some progress in understanding occupational illness and disease was being made in Europe, little was written or understood about occupational disease conditions in the U.S. In 1908, she published one of the first articles on occupational disease in this country and was soon a recognized expert on the topic. Starting in 1910, under the sponsorship initially of a commission of the State of Illinois and later the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, she conducted a series of brilliant explorations of occupational toxic disorders. Relying primarily on “shoe leather epidemiology” and the emerging laboratory science of toxicology, she pioneered occupational epidemiology and industrial hygiene in the U.S. Her findings were so scientifically persuasive that they caused sweeping reforms, both voluntary and regulatory, to improve the health of workers.

In 1919, Dr. Hamilton was appointed Assistant Professor of Industrial Medicine at Harvard Medical School and became the first female faculty member at Harvard University. There she served two terms on the Health Committee of the League of Nations. She moved to the Harvard School of Public Health upon its founding and chaired the Department of Industrial Medicine. While she was considered to be the best candidate for the position, the University was against the idea of a woman educating men, as the predominant idea at the time was that only men could educate men. But the School of Public Health’s leaders persisted, and eventually the University accepted her on their faculty in Industrial Medicine. The department would eventually give birth to the training program in Occupational and Industrial Medicine. When she retired from Harvard at the age of sixty-six, she became a consultant to the U.S. Division of Labor Standards and served as President of the National Consumers League.

Harriet L. Hardy was a student of Dr. Alice Hamilton and a pioneer in the field of occupational medicine. She was also the first woman professor at Harvard Medical School. She attended Wellesley College and medical school at Cornell University and completed residency training at Philadelphia General Hospital.

Her investigation into the respiratory illness among workers making fluorescent lamps at the General Electric and Sylvania plants on Boston’s North Shore led to the revelation of the harmful effects of beryllium exposure, leading to precautions allowing safer use of beryllium.

She also worked with the Atomic Energy Commission in Los Alamos, NM, to study the hazards associated with nuclear energy. She was also among the first to link asbestos and cancer. She also held leadership roles at the Atomic Energy Commission, United Mine Workers, and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).