May 6, 2019 • 27 mins
Dr. Alice Hamilton was a trailblazer in science and medicine, and dedicated her life to improving the workplace standards for laborers in an effort to reduce illnesses that came from working with toxic chemicals.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B.
Wilson and Tracy. Today's episode is going to delve into
the start of the study of occupational disease and the
woman behind that beginning. That's an important field, it is,
(00:24):
and it's one of those interesting things that we see
is so important today but a hundred years ago not
so much. Well, occupational health has also been affecting people
for much, much, much longer than it has existed as
a field, like Yes, and it is one of those
things that even while I was researching this episode, I
found myself going, why why didn't anybody study this? There's
(00:48):
there's pretty obvious cause and effect for some of this stuff. Welle. Yeah,
but a number of previous episode topics are going to
get mentioned as we uh go through this story. Yes,
uh so. Dr Alice Hamilton's was a trailblazer in science
and medicine, and she dedicated her life to improving the
workplace standards for laborers in an effort to reduce illnesses
(01:10):
that came ardly from working with toxic chemicals, and this
episode was requested by our listener Emily, who actually sent
us a book to kickstart research, which is very kind
and it's actually a really fun book. So thank you, Emily.
So on February eighteen sixty nine, Alice Hamilton was born
in New York City. Her parents were Montgomery Hamilton's and
(01:30):
Gertrude Pond. The family had really strong roots in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
That was where her grandfather had been a land speculator
and entrepreneur after immigrating from Ireland to the United States,
and he had bought and sold a lot of property
in Fort Wayne. Yeah, I read one account that basically said,
like almost any piece of property you stand on in
(01:50):
Fort Wayne today at some point passed through his hands
in terms of ownership. Alice was born in New York
because her mother, Gertrude, had wanted to go to have
the baby at her only home, which was in New York.
But when Alice was still very very tiny, she and
her mother went back home to Fort Wayne to live
on the property that they had there, which is a
family called Old House, and the Old House itself had
(02:12):
been built in eighteen forty and Alice once described it
as having been built quote for beauty, space, dignity, not
for comfort and convenience. The family had staff, and so
that inconvenience was borne by them, but Alice was very
aware of the inherent wastefulness in building rooms so large
that there had to be someone constantly tending to the fires,
(02:33):
and having so many stories before running water that maids
had to continually be carting water up flights of stairs
on Montgomery. Gertrude and the children didn't live in Old House,
although they spent a lot of their time there. They
had a slightly smaller home on the same property called
White House, and a home called Red House was where
Alice's uncle lived. The one thing that Alice saw is
(02:57):
a great benefit in those overly large hall elmes was
the ability to find some quiet space to be alone
and get away from the bustle of a very large family.
Alice and her sisters Edith, Margaret, and Norah, and her
one baby brother, Arthur, who came along a little later,
were home schooled by their parents. Gertrude Pond Hamilton's thought
that the hours of public schools were unreasonable, and her father,
(03:21):
Montgomery thought that the subjects that they taught at those
schools were far too boring for his children. Uh. Edith
incidentally went on to become a well known author and classicists.
You mean recognize the name of Hamilton's and the sisters
had all been born pretty closely, within six years of
each other, and they were very very close to one another.
Their brother, Arthur, who went by quint was born much
(03:41):
later when Alice was seventeen. Alice described this upbringing, being
taught at home and not really having friends outside of
their family, as one that turned them all into book
worms eventually. Quote and since we saw so little of
any children outside our own family, the people we met
in books became real to us. But to be clear,
(04:01):
there were other children around. Eleven cousins lived on the
property where old house and the other home set, so
sort of a giant family compound kind of yes. Uh.
And it wasn't until Alice was a teenager of seventeen
that she received any formal education, when she attended Miss
Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut. And that was and still
(04:25):
is a private preparatory school in Connecticut, and Alice's time
there was the prelude to entering the University of Michigan
Medical School. Alice thought that the school was awful, and
she selected courses that would either be fairly easy. She
already had a lot of linguistics education from her parents,
so she took a lot of that, or she picked
courses for which she could just memorize the needed information
(04:48):
without really digesting and understanding it. But that meant that
when she decided to go into medicine she was woefully lacking.
She needed to take extra classes to get properly prepared
for it. She had take physics, chemistry, biology, and anatomy
courses after she finished at Miss Porter's. Once those were complete,
she enrolled at the University of Michigan. Even though this
(05:10):
was decades after Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to
graduate for medical school in the United States, it was
still pretty unusual for a woman to pursue a career
as a physician. But it turned out that Alice really
loved both the freedom and the challenge of being on
her own and learning so much about clinical and lab work. Eventually,
(05:30):
she decided she wanted to do research instead of practice medicine,
and when she finished medical school in eight she worked
as an intern in Minneapolis Minnesota at the Hospital for
Women and Children, and after two months there, she moved
to her next training position, this time at the New
England Hospital for Women and Children, which is located near Boston.
(05:50):
Her education continued after that. She studied in Leipzig and
Munich over the course of a year. Because Germany was
really where her chosen fields of bacteriology and pathology were
most advanced. This was a tricky thing for her to
negotiate because German schools were not open to women at
that time. Alice and her sister Edith, who traveled to
(06:11):
Germany with her, had to promise that they would be
invisible to the male students. After gaining a solid level
of knowledge in Europe, Alice came back to the United
States to attend Johns Hopkins University for a year. Once
all of that schooling was done, Hamilton's made the switch
in roles from student to educator and she began teaching
at the Northwestern University's Women's Medical School. In addition to
(06:35):
her teaching, she also joined Chicago's Hull House and moved
in there. That is the settlement house founded by Jane
Adams that we discussed in our episode about Adams Alice
Hamilton has actually mentioned very briefly in that episode, and
as part of her life at Hull House, Alice founded
a well baby clinic for the community, and she also
made the connection between typhoid spread and poor sewage disposal
(06:58):
during the nineteen two epidemic in Chicago. Hull House made
a big impact on Alice, and her ongoing work there
really shaped her worldview. She once famously said of it quote,
life in a settlement does several things to you. Among others,
it teaches you that education and culture have little to
do with real wisdom, the wisdom that comes from experiences.
(07:20):
And it was during this work at Hull House and
offering medical treatment and assistance to the poor families in
the community, that Alice started to see firsthand just how
closely linked disease was to poverty, and she started to
realize just how dangerous working conditions were for the poor,
who were often immigrants with little power to improve their
workplaces or to move into less hazardous careers. In she
(07:44):
wrote her first paper on the subject of occupational disease,
and her works importance and her level of knowledge on
the topic were pretty quickly acknowledged. This is the time
when workers in the United States were routinely handling toxic
substances with little to no protection. We have talked on
the podcast before about things like fossy jaw and mercury poisoning,
and those were not uncommon among poor laborers, but in
(08:07):
the United States there really wasn't any formal work being
done to study these kinds of issues in the workplace.
And we're going to talk about the next stage in
Hamilton's career, which came because of the recognition that she
achieved for that early work in studying occupational disease. But
first we'll pause and have a little of sponsor break.
(08:33):
In Alice Hamilton's was appointed to lead an Occupational Disease
Commission which was formed by Illinois Governor Charles Deneen, and
that commission was established to study industrial disease. It was
the first of its kind in the United States. Lead, arsenic,
carbon monoxide, brass, cyanides, and turpentine were all to be
(08:54):
studied over the course of a year per the Governor's office,
and Hamilton's, in addition to being the leader of this initiative,
focused on lead in particular, and so she started researching
the connection between industry and disease, pioneering the field of
occupational epidemiology. She later wrote quote, it was while I
was living in Hull House and working in bacteriological research
(09:17):
that the opportunity came to me to investigate the dangerous
trades of Illinois, not those where violent accidents occurred, but
those with the less spectacular hazard of sickness from some
industrial poison. It was a voyage of exploration that we
undertook our little group of physicians and student assistants, for
nobody in Illinois knew even then where we should make
(09:38):
our investigation beyond a few notorious led trades. American medical
authorities had never taken industrial diseases seriously. The American Medical
associations had never held a meeting on the subject, and
while European journals were full of articles on industrial poisoning,
the number published in American medical journals up to nineteen
(09:59):
ten could be counted on one's fingers. And the work
on this project was extensive. Dr Hamilton's and her team
spoke with laborers and pharmacists about factory conditions and instances
of lead poisoning. They also reviewed medical records and hospitals,
and they went to factories to see for themselves what
the conditions were like. And, as you might suspect, this
(10:21):
line of investigation was not exactly welcomed by some of
the people in power in the industries that she wanted
to research. In her autobiography, she describes some of the
attitudes about illness and injury that she encountered. Quote, as
I look back, some striking pictures come to me of
that anarchic period. One is the picture of the works
(10:42):
manager of a big white lead plant, a gentleman of
breeding and something of a philanthropist. He is looking at
me indignantly and exclaiming why that sounds as if you
think that when a man gets lead poisoning in my plant,
I ought to be held responsible. Another is that of
a Hungarian men at Hull House telling me of a
terrible accident and a steel mill on the South shore
(11:04):
in which her husband had been injured. He and the
other victims were being held in communicato and the company hospital.
No one was allowed to see them. She knew nothing
except that her husband was not dead. Yeah, she has
a lot of accounts. If you read her autobiography, there
are many similar stories that she witnessed A lot of
Hamilton's writing on the issues she was researching at this
(11:26):
time mentioned the various people who were ignorant and indifferent
in allowing dangerous circumstances to continue to be the norm
in factories, from the owners to the foreman, to the
company doctors, and even the workers. She wrote quote, the
employers could, if they wished, shut their eyes to the
dangers their workmen faced, for nobody held them responsible, while
(11:47):
the workers accepted the risks with fatalistic submissiveness as part
of the price one must pay for being poor. She
also cataloged the various excuses she was given by employers
and her investigation about illness and disease among their workers.
Some took racist positions, claiming that the various immigrant groups
were filthy and never washed. Others claimed that various illnesses
(12:11):
weren't the result of anything related to their work, but
were caused by alcoholism among the employees. She wrote, quote,
there is no form of industrial poisoning which I have
not heard some man attribute to whiskey. Even though Hamilton's
and her colleagues had been appointed to a commission by
the governor, they didn't have any actual authority to just
walk into plants and start asking questions. And there was
(12:34):
also no real set of guidelines or procedure for how
they should do this work, so they simply started looking
for themselves for places that would fall under the umbrella
of their mandate, and then they would just ask to
enter and look around and speak with someone in authority.
And Alice does mention in her writing that she was
always greeted with kindness and that in some cases foreman
(12:55):
or factory owners already had their own worries about employee
health and they were actually really glad to have someone
helping them figure out the problem. This commission wasn't intended
to be a whistleblowing operation, though Alice wasn't supposed to
identify any of the factories and her reports by name
or give details that could identify them, and she submitted
(13:15):
the reports in the manner that was requested. She wasn't
completely comfortable with that, though. She worried that people weren't
being helped in a direct way while government agencies reviewed
the findings of the report, so she started a habit
of telling the men in charge of the factories where
she found concerns exactly what she felt was wrong. She
gave these men her own recommendations for the simple steps
(13:37):
they might take to improve conditions, and later she wrote
about how surprised she was that this informal quote primitive
method actually worked. In one case, she had visited a
white lead works that was opened with the intent of
being safe, but then there hadn't been a protocol in
place to remove waste materials from production, and there were
piles of it around the factory, and she spoke to
(14:00):
the manager, but he was not very enthused about being
told what to do. The plant owner wasn't really an option.
He was elderly and not really actively involved in running
the factory. But then she remembered that she actually knew
the owner's daughter. The two women had gone to school together,
and so by reaching out through that channel, Alice was
able to explain to her former schoolmate problems going on
(14:22):
in the lead works and encourage a little bit of change,
and that worked. The factory not only changed its operating
procedures to include removal of the waste products on a
regular basis, leadership actually asked Alice to stop by periodically
and inspect things for them and just touch base, and
she continued to develop relationships both through these kinds of
(14:42):
ways and with managers and foremen as often as possible
so that she could keep their discussions about safety cordial,
and she continued to leverage any other means she could
to enact change in ways that her government work couldn't
really do. Ultimately, though the report that Alice compiled with
her colleagues did have significant impact, it made a clear
(15:03):
case showing that illnesses were often the result of on
the job conditions. In nineteen eleven, the State of Illinois
pass legislation that required three things of employers. One they
had to follow new safety guidelines to minimize the risk
of occupational disease. Two, if they employed workers in so
called dangerous trades, they had to provide monthly health screening
(15:24):
for those employees. And three, they had to report any
illnesses to the Department of Factory Inspection. In nineteen eleven,
after her work with the State of Illinois Commission concluded,
Alice Hamilton was asked to serve as a special investigator
for the Federal Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics
because of the reputation she had earned for her work
at the state level, and she served in that role
(15:47):
for almost a decade and continued her study and investigation
of lead in industry, as well as rubber, viscast rayon,
and other substances. Hamilton's continued to break barriers in her career,
and we will get to another of those right after
we pause for one of the sponsors that keeps us going.
(16:11):
During World War One, Hamilton's turned her attentions to the
industries associated with war for investigation. She studied factories where
munitions were made, and she submitted reports outlining the dangers
of the various chemicals involved and how those dangers might
be addressed for work or safety. Many safety procedures were
established because of the work she did during those years.
(16:32):
She also commented at one point that she felt like
because the government was so quick to act on those recommendations,
it kind of gave her work a level of credibility
that it hadn't really had before. Nearing the end of
her work in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Hamilton's was
offered a position teaching at Harvard Medical School as an
assistant professor of Industrial Medicine. That made her the first
(16:53):
woman on the faculty there. And there's some irony in
that appointment, the school wasn't accepting women as students at
the time. When she was interviewed on the subject, Alice
Hamilton was always quick to point out that she shouldn't
have been the first woman on the faculty. She was
I was like, yes, I am uh. We should have
been doing this before. Uh. And despite the attention that
(17:17):
her groundbreaking position gained the school, she was denied a
number of benefits that were available to other faculty members.
For example, she wasn't allowed into the faculty club, and
she wasn't allowed to participate in the commencement procession, and
she would not receive any football tickets. Those were all
benefits that any other faculty member would have had. But
as part of her hiring negotiation, Dr Hamilton's wanted to
(17:40):
teach only one semester each year, and that way the
remainder of the year would be spent on her work
at Hull House and on her ongoing research into toxicology
in Alice was appointed to the League of Nation's Health Committee,
that made her the only woman chosen for it. That
same year, she was invited to the Soviet Union top
her expertise on the management and treatment of occupational disease.
(18:03):
There Hamilton's continued to use her various positions to work
not just for the betterment of occupational health, but also
for social reform and healthcare. Her work with impoverished communities
continued to drive her efforts, including work in epidemic disease,
infant mortality reduction, and addiction, and she also advocated for
(18:23):
family planning at a time when that was not a
very welcome topic because she saw how much women in
impoverished communities really didn't have education on the matter, and
also in some cases their health was put at risk
by having pregnancy after pregnancy, after pregnancy. She also worked
in the interest of women's labor rights, even when that
position stood in opposition to legislation that was introduced for
(18:46):
equal rights. Hamilton was concerned that the wording of bills
introduced for equality in the workplace would diminish protections for
women in the workplace, so she became an advocate for
women in labor industries like textile mills, food packaging and
processing plants, as well as hospitality. In nineteen fifty two,
she became an advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment once
(19:06):
she felt that equality legislation wouldn't diminish protections for women
at work, and part of the reason she was so
adamant about those protections was that she had collected data
that showed that there were ways in which women were
more vulnerable than men when it came to certain issues
of industrial poisoning. Her research indicated that women were more susceptible,
particularly to lead poisoning, and all industrial poisonings had the
(19:29):
added complication of potentially causing birth defects and or sterility.
In she wrote the first text on toxicology, titled Industrial
Poisons in the United States. Nine years later, in nineteen
thirty four, she wrote another text book, Industrial Toxicology. The
year after Industrial Toxicology was first published, Hamilton's time at
(19:51):
Harvard ended because she reached mandatory retirement age. In the
sixteen years that she was there, she was never promoted
beyond the title of assistant professor, and instead had been
employed on a series of three year contracts that renewed
over and over. After leaving Harvard, Hamilton's who was sixty
six at the time, hadn't actually retired from her life's work.
She moved to Haadline, Connecticut with her sister, Margaret, who
(20:14):
like all four of the Hamilton's sisters, had not married,
and Alice continued to consult on the topic of toxicology
in industrial settings, including acting as an advisor to New
York State Industrial Commissioner Francis Perkins. Even outside of consulting,
Dr Hamilton's stayed busy. In y three, she wrote her autobiography,
exploring the Dangerous Trades. She revised her textbook Industrial Toxicology
(20:38):
in nineteen forty nine when she was eighty, and as
Joseph McCarthy stirred up the Second Red Scare in the
U S and the late forties and early fifties, she
spoke out against it. At that point she was in
her eighties. That activism continued into her nineties, when she
wrote to President Kennedy to urge him to get American
troops out of Vietnam. On February nineteen sixty nine, Hamilton's
(21:00):
celebrated her one dred birthday the following year. She died
on September twenty, nineteen seventy, after having a stroke. Three
months after her death, on December seventy, the Occupational Safety
and Health Act of nineteen seventy became law. It's opening
paragraph reads an Act to assure safe and healthful working
(21:21):
conditions for working men and women, by authorizing enforcement of
the standards, development of the Act, by assisting and encouraging
the States and their efforts to assure safe and healthful
working conditions, by providing for research, information, education, and training
in the field of occupational safety and health, and for
other purposes. Yes, so that was kind of the culmination
(21:42):
of her life's work, and she just missed seeing it
happened by a few months. Today, the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention give out the Alice B. Hamilton Awards
for Occupational Safety and Health, and on her birthday in
ninety seven, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
Ridge Avenue Facility in Cincinnati, Ohio was dedicated to her
memory and named the Alice Hamilton's Laboratory for Occupational Safety
(22:06):
and Health. In two thousand two, the American Chemical Society
designated Alice Hamilton's and her work in industrial medicine a
National Historic Chemical Landmark. And to close, I wanted to
offer up a fairly famous quote from Dr Allis Hamilton's autobiography,
and it reads, quote, I chose medicine not because I
was scientifically minded, for I was deeply ignorant of science.
(22:28):
I chose it because as a doctor, I could go
anywhere I pleased, too far off lands or to city slums,
and be quite sure I could be of use anywhere.
That's such a great sentiment, it is. And it's like
her heaps me too. Uh. One of the things that
I think is really interesting about her story is that
it's sort of it shows how when there's progress in
(22:50):
some field, it's not like there's a switch that gets
flipped where everything is fixed now, like the Radium girls
were after this, and like I think she was part
of some of the investigation of that, and like that
was well after Illinois had passed laws related to this.
Like it's it's an example of sort of the trajectory
(23:12):
of things that that take a while. And of course
there are plenty of occupational issues that still exists today. Yeah.
In her autobiography, which we mentioned was written in the forties,
there's a funny moment where she talks about how, like
to her, it's almost amusing that people started using like
the the safety first wording, when she's like, when I
(23:33):
started doing this, that would have been like an athema
nobody would have said those words. So she was seeing
the progress and could appreciate her impact even if she
did not get to see that the Osha law finally
signed into reality. That law is older than I thought
it was. Yeah, yeah, it's one of those things I
think people don't always know, like the origin point for OSHA,
(23:56):
Like we used that acronym as a word all the time,
but when you really think about, like someone had to
go and investigate all of these things into trumine, that
there was a very clear link between some of the
work that was happening and some of the illnesses that
were resulting, uh and document all of it so that
there could be a clear case made. And it was
largely uh, you know, her instigating it in the United
(24:18):
States at least, there was, as we mentioned, uh, stuff
going on in other parts of the globe where they
had already begun that kind of research. But Alice Hamilton
sure love her. I also noticed, in case anyone's curious,
when you look at biographies of her, uh, she isn't
very often addressed as Dr Alice Hamilton's and I think
that's because she didn't go into practice as a medical doctor,
(24:40):
but instead took this research route, but she did finish
medical school and wasn't empty, so we kind of switched
a little bit and included it periodically just to remind people. Um,
but I don't think she went by Dr Hamilton's on
the regular in her day to day life. Do you
have some listener mail to take us out? I do,
and it's actually about an episode that you did. But
(25:00):
it's a piece of physical male so I thought I
would read it so you would get to hear it
since you're not here in Atlanta. Uh. It starts Hello,
Holly and Tracy. I was delighted to hear your episode
on Juliette Gordon Lowe. I've been a Girl Scout troop
leader for three years, but have been involved for about
eight years. I have two daughters and Girl Scouts. It
is a major part of our lives. I love the
program and I've seen my girls grow and developed through
(25:22):
the various levels of scouting. Girl Scouting has also allowed
me and my girls to travel with our troops through
selling cookies. We have traveled to places that we could
never have gone on our own family budget. This was
such a fun episode for me to listen to you
as a girl Scout leader. Part of Girl Scouting is
teaching the girls the history of how Girl Scouts started
and who Juliette Gordon Lowe was. I have learned many
(25:43):
of the stories you shared about Juliette's life, but it
was also interesting to hear other tidbits that get left out.
I love Juliette Gordon Lowe and what she started. I'm
inspired by her life because she was in her fifties
before truly finding out what she loved. As somebody who
just turned forty and still figuring out what life has
a store for me, I looked to her to see
that big things still await you even when you are older.
(26:05):
I love that sentiment as well. I haven't closed a
print of my favorite Juliet Gordon low quote, and I
love this quote because of all the work I do
with young girls and teenagers through the Girl Scouts. I
also think it is the perfect quote for a history podcast.
Thank you so much for the research you do and
the entertaining episodes you and your team produce. I love
your podcast. I've listened for years and I've always wanted
to send you something. I'm glad I finally had the
(26:26):
perfect reason to write in and share uh yours and
girl Scouting Samantha, And she also writes ps Tracy wants
a girl Scout, Always a girl scout. It's one of
our sayings. And she wrote sent us to prints that
just have a cute quote. This is the work of
today as the history of tomorrow, and we are its makers.
I love it so Thank you so much, Samantha, because
(26:49):
we agree. Juliet Gordon Low is pretty cool, and the
Scouts do a lot of good work. And I really
really like the beautiful Prince again. The idea that you
can find your life is calling it any age, me too.
If you would like to write to us, you can
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You can also find us pretty much everywhere on social
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listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B.
Wilson and Tracy. Today's episode is going to delve into
the start of the study of occupational disease and the
woman behind that beginning. That's an important field, it is,
(00:24):
and it's one of those interesting things that we see
is so important today but a hundred years ago not
so much. Well, occupational health has also been affecting people
for much, much, much longer than it has existed as
a field, like Yes, and it is one of those
things that even while I was researching this episode, I
found myself going, why why didn't anybody study this? There's
(00:48):
there's pretty obvious cause and effect for some of this stuff. Welle. Yeah,
but a number of previous episode topics are going to
get mentioned as we uh go through this story. Yes,
uh so. Dr Alice Hamilton's was a trailblazer in science
and medicine, and she dedicated her life to improving the
workplace standards for laborers in an effort to reduce illnesses
(01:10):
that came ardly from working with toxic chemicals, and this
episode was requested by our listener Emily, who actually sent
us a book to kickstart research, which is very kind
and it's actually a really fun book. So thank you, Emily.
So on February eighteen sixty nine, Alice Hamilton was born
in New York City. Her parents were Montgomery Hamilton's and
(01:30):
Gertrude Pond. The family had really strong roots in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
That was where her grandfather had been a land speculator
and entrepreneur after immigrating from Ireland to the United States,
and he had bought and sold a lot of property
in Fort Wayne. Yeah, I read one account that basically said,
like almost any piece of property you stand on in
(01:50):
Fort Wayne today at some point passed through his hands
in terms of ownership. Alice was born in New York
because her mother, Gertrude, had wanted to go to have
the baby at her only home, which was in New York.
But when Alice was still very very tiny, she and
her mother went back home to Fort Wayne to live
on the property that they had there, which is a
family called Old House, and the Old House itself had
(02:12):
been built in eighteen forty and Alice once described it
as having been built quote for beauty, space, dignity, not
for comfort and convenience. The family had staff, and so
that inconvenience was borne by them, but Alice was very
aware of the inherent wastefulness in building rooms so large
that there had to be someone constantly tending to the fires,
(02:33):
and having so many stories before running water that maids
had to continually be carting water up flights of stairs
on Montgomery. Gertrude and the children didn't live in Old House,
although they spent a lot of their time there. They
had a slightly smaller home on the same property called
White House, and a home called Red House was where
Alice's uncle lived. The one thing that Alice saw is
(02:57):
a great benefit in those overly large hall elmes was
the ability to find some quiet space to be alone
and get away from the bustle of a very large family.
Alice and her sisters Edith, Margaret, and Norah, and her
one baby brother, Arthur, who came along a little later,
were home schooled by their parents. Gertrude Pond Hamilton's thought
that the hours of public schools were unreasonable, and her father,
(03:21):
Montgomery thought that the subjects that they taught at those
schools were far too boring for his children. Uh. Edith
incidentally went on to become a well known author and classicists.
You mean recognize the name of Hamilton's and the sisters
had all been born pretty closely, within six years of
each other, and they were very very close to one another.
Their brother, Arthur, who went by quint was born much
(03:41):
later when Alice was seventeen. Alice described this upbringing, being
taught at home and not really having friends outside of
their family, as one that turned them all into book
worms eventually. Quote and since we saw so little of
any children outside our own family, the people we met
in books became real to us. But to be clear,
(04:01):
there were other children around. Eleven cousins lived on the
property where old house and the other home set, so
sort of a giant family compound kind of yes. Uh.
And it wasn't until Alice was a teenager of seventeen
that she received any formal education, when she attended Miss
Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut. And that was and still
(04:25):
is a private preparatory school in Connecticut, and Alice's time
there was the prelude to entering the University of Michigan
Medical School. Alice thought that the school was awful, and
she selected courses that would either be fairly easy. She
already had a lot of linguistics education from her parents,
so she took a lot of that, or she picked
courses for which she could just memorize the needed information
(04:48):
without really digesting and understanding it. But that meant that
when she decided to go into medicine she was woefully lacking.
She needed to take extra classes to get properly prepared
for it. She had take physics, chemistry, biology, and anatomy
courses after she finished at Miss Porter's. Once those were complete,
she enrolled at the University of Michigan. Even though this
(05:10):
was decades after Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to
graduate for medical school in the United States, it was
still pretty unusual for a woman to pursue a career
as a physician. But it turned out that Alice really
loved both the freedom and the challenge of being on
her own and learning so much about clinical and lab work. Eventually,
(05:30):
she decided she wanted to do research instead of practice medicine,
and when she finished medical school in eight she worked
as an intern in Minneapolis Minnesota at the Hospital for
Women and Children, and after two months there, she moved
to her next training position, this time at the New
England Hospital for Women and Children, which is located near Boston.
(05:50):
Her education continued after that. She studied in Leipzig and
Munich over the course of a year. Because Germany was
really where her chosen fields of bacteriology and pathology were
most advanced. This was a tricky thing for her to
negotiate because German schools were not open to women at
that time. Alice and her sister Edith, who traveled to
(06:11):
Germany with her, had to promise that they would be
invisible to the male students. After gaining a solid level
of knowledge in Europe, Alice came back to the United
States to attend Johns Hopkins University for a year. Once
all of that schooling was done, Hamilton's made the switch
in roles from student to educator and she began teaching
at the Northwestern University's Women's Medical School. In addition to
(06:35):
her teaching, she also joined Chicago's Hull House and moved
in there. That is the settlement house founded by Jane
Adams that we discussed in our episode about Adams Alice
Hamilton has actually mentioned very briefly in that episode, and
as part of her life at Hull House, Alice founded
a well baby clinic for the community, and she also
made the connection between typhoid spread and poor sewage disposal
(06:58):
during the nineteen two epidemic in Chicago. Hull House made
a big impact on Alice, and her ongoing work there
really shaped her worldview. She once famously said of it quote,
life in a settlement does several things to you. Among others,
it teaches you that education and culture have little to
do with real wisdom, the wisdom that comes from experiences.
(07:20):
And it was during this work at Hull House and
offering medical treatment and assistance to the poor families in
the community, that Alice started to see firsthand just how
closely linked disease was to poverty, and she started to
realize just how dangerous working conditions were for the poor,
who were often immigrants with little power to improve their
workplaces or to move into less hazardous careers. In she
(07:44):
wrote her first paper on the subject of occupational disease,
and her works importance and her level of knowledge on
the topic were pretty quickly acknowledged. This is the time
when workers in the United States were routinely handling toxic
substances with little to no protection. We have talked on
the podcast before about things like fossy jaw and mercury poisoning,
and those were not uncommon among poor laborers, but in
(08:07):
the United States there really wasn't any formal work being
done to study these kinds of issues in the workplace.
And we're going to talk about the next stage in
Hamilton's career, which came because of the recognition that she
achieved for that early work in studying occupational disease. But
first we'll pause and have a little of sponsor break.
(08:33):
In Alice Hamilton's was appointed to lead an Occupational Disease
Commission which was formed by Illinois Governor Charles Deneen, and
that commission was established to study industrial disease. It was
the first of its kind in the United States. Lead, arsenic,
carbon monoxide, brass, cyanides, and turpentine were all to be
(08:54):
studied over the course of a year per the Governor's office,
and Hamilton's, in addition to being the leader of this initiative,
focused on lead in particular, and so she started researching
the connection between industry and disease, pioneering the field of
occupational epidemiology. She later wrote quote, it was while I
was living in Hull House and working in bacteriological research
(09:17):
that the opportunity came to me to investigate the dangerous
trades of Illinois, not those where violent accidents occurred, but
those with the less spectacular hazard of sickness from some
industrial poison. It was a voyage of exploration that we
undertook our little group of physicians and student assistants, for
nobody in Illinois knew even then where we should make
(09:38):
our investigation beyond a few notorious led trades. American medical
authorities had never taken industrial diseases seriously. The American Medical
associations had never held a meeting on the subject, and
while European journals were full of articles on industrial poisoning,
the number published in American medical journals up to nineteen
(09:59):
ten could be counted on one's fingers. And the work
on this project was extensive. Dr Hamilton's and her team
spoke with laborers and pharmacists about factory conditions and instances
of lead poisoning. They also reviewed medical records and hospitals,
and they went to factories to see for themselves what
the conditions were like. And, as you might suspect, this
(10:21):
line of investigation was not exactly welcomed by some of
the people in power in the industries that she wanted
to research. In her autobiography, she describes some of the
attitudes about illness and injury that she encountered. Quote, as
I look back, some striking pictures come to me of
that anarchic period. One is the picture of the works
(10:42):
manager of a big white lead plant, a gentleman of
breeding and something of a philanthropist. He is looking at
me indignantly and exclaiming why that sounds as if you
think that when a man gets lead poisoning in my plant,
I ought to be held responsible. Another is that of
a Hungarian men at Hull House telling me of a
terrible accident and a steel mill on the South shore
(11:04):
in which her husband had been injured. He and the
other victims were being held in communicato and the company hospital.
No one was allowed to see them. She knew nothing
except that her husband was not dead. Yeah, she has
a lot of accounts. If you read her autobiography, there
are many similar stories that she witnessed A lot of
Hamilton's writing on the issues she was researching at this
(11:26):
time mentioned the various people who were ignorant and indifferent
in allowing dangerous circumstances to continue to be the norm
in factories, from the owners to the foreman, to the
company doctors, and even the workers. She wrote quote, the
employers could, if they wished, shut their eyes to the
dangers their workmen faced, for nobody held them responsible, while
(11:47):
the workers accepted the risks with fatalistic submissiveness as part
of the price one must pay for being poor. She
also cataloged the various excuses she was given by employers
and her investigation about illness and disease among their workers.
Some took racist positions, claiming that the various immigrant groups
were filthy and never washed. Others claimed that various illnesses
(12:11):
weren't the result of anything related to their work, but
were caused by alcoholism among the employees. She wrote, quote,
there is no form of industrial poisoning which I have
not heard some man attribute to whiskey. Even though Hamilton's
and her colleagues had been appointed to a commission by
the governor, they didn't have any actual authority to just
walk into plants and start asking questions. And there was
(12:34):
also no real set of guidelines or procedure for how
they should do this work, so they simply started looking
for themselves for places that would fall under the umbrella
of their mandate, and then they would just ask to
enter and look around and speak with someone in authority.
And Alice does mention in her writing that she was
always greeted with kindness and that in some cases foreman
(12:55):
or factory owners already had their own worries about employee
health and they were actually really glad to have someone
helping them figure out the problem. This commission wasn't intended
to be a whistleblowing operation, though Alice wasn't supposed to
identify any of the factories and her reports by name
or give details that could identify them, and she submitted
(13:15):
the reports in the manner that was requested. She wasn't
completely comfortable with that, though. She worried that people weren't
being helped in a direct way while government agencies reviewed
the findings of the report, so she started a habit
of telling the men in charge of the factories where
she found concerns exactly what she felt was wrong. She
gave these men her own recommendations for the simple steps
(13:37):
they might take to improve conditions, and later she wrote
about how surprised she was that this informal quote primitive
method actually worked. In one case, she had visited a
white lead works that was opened with the intent of
being safe, but then there hadn't been a protocol in
place to remove waste materials from production, and there were
piles of it around the factory, and she spoke to
(14:00):
the manager, but he was not very enthused about being
told what to do. The plant owner wasn't really an option.
He was elderly and not really actively involved in running
the factory. But then she remembered that she actually knew
the owner's daughter. The two women had gone to school together,
and so by reaching out through that channel, Alice was
able to explain to her former schoolmate problems going on
(14:22):
in the lead works and encourage a little bit of change,
and that worked. The factory not only changed its operating
procedures to include removal of the waste products on a
regular basis, leadership actually asked Alice to stop by periodically
and inspect things for them and just touch base, and
she continued to develop relationships both through these kinds of
(14:42):
ways and with managers and foremen as often as possible
so that she could keep their discussions about safety cordial,
and she continued to leverage any other means she could
to enact change in ways that her government work couldn't
really do. Ultimately, though the report that Alice compiled with
her colleagues did have significant impact, it made a clear
(15:03):
case showing that illnesses were often the result of on
the job conditions. In nineteen eleven, the State of Illinois
pass legislation that required three things of employers. One they
had to follow new safety guidelines to minimize the risk
of occupational disease. Two, if they employed workers in so
called dangerous trades, they had to provide monthly health screening
(15:24):
for those employees. And three, they had to report any
illnesses to the Department of Factory Inspection. In nineteen eleven,
after her work with the State of Illinois Commission concluded,
Alice Hamilton was asked to serve as a special investigator
for the Federal Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics
because of the reputation she had earned for her work
at the state level, and she served in that role
(15:47):
for almost a decade and continued her study and investigation
of lead in industry, as well as rubber, viscast rayon,
and other substances. Hamilton's continued to break barriers in her career,
and we will get to another of those right after
we pause for one of the sponsors that keeps us going.
(16:11):
During World War One, Hamilton's turned her attentions to the
industries associated with war for investigation. She studied factories where
munitions were made, and she submitted reports outlining the dangers
of the various chemicals involved and how those dangers might
be addressed for work or safety. Many safety procedures were
established because of the work she did during those years.
(16:32):
She also commented at one point that she felt like
because the government was so quick to act on those recommendations,
it kind of gave her work a level of credibility
that it hadn't really had before. Nearing the end of
her work in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Hamilton's was
offered a position teaching at Harvard Medical School as an
assistant professor of Industrial Medicine. That made her the first
(16:53):
woman on the faculty there. And there's some irony in
that appointment, the school wasn't accepting women as students at
the time. When she was interviewed on the subject, Alice
Hamilton was always quick to point out that she shouldn't
have been the first woman on the faculty. She was
I was like, yes, I am uh. We should have
been doing this before. Uh. And despite the attention that
(17:17):
her groundbreaking position gained the school, she was denied a
number of benefits that were available to other faculty members.
For example, she wasn't allowed into the faculty club, and
she wasn't allowed to participate in the commencement procession, and
she would not receive any football tickets. Those were all
benefits that any other faculty member would have had. But
as part of her hiring negotiation, Dr Hamilton's wanted to
(17:40):
teach only one semester each year, and that way the
remainder of the year would be spent on her work
at Hull House and on her ongoing research into toxicology
in Alice was appointed to the League of Nation's Health Committee,
that made her the only woman chosen for it. That
same year, she was invited to the Soviet Union top
her expertise on the management and treatment of occupational disease.
(18:03):
There Hamilton's continued to use her various positions to work
not just for the betterment of occupational health, but also
for social reform and healthcare. Her work with impoverished communities
continued to drive her efforts, including work in epidemic disease,
infant mortality reduction, and addiction, and she also advocated for
(18:23):
family planning at a time when that was not a
very welcome topic because she saw how much women in
impoverished communities really didn't have education on the matter, and
also in some cases their health was put at risk
by having pregnancy after pregnancy, after pregnancy. She also worked
in the interest of women's labor rights, even when that
position stood in opposition to legislation that was introduced for
(18:46):
equal rights. Hamilton was concerned that the wording of bills
introduced for equality in the workplace would diminish protections for
women in the workplace, so she became an advocate for
women in labor industries like textile mills, food packaging and
processing plants, as well as hospitality. In nineteen fifty two,
she became an advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment once
(19:06):
she felt that equality legislation wouldn't diminish protections for women
at work, and part of the reason she was so
adamant about those protections was that she had collected data
that showed that there were ways in which women were
more vulnerable than men when it came to certain issues
of industrial poisoning. Her research indicated that women were more susceptible,
particularly to lead poisoning, and all industrial poisonings had the
(19:29):
added complication of potentially causing birth defects and or sterility.
In she wrote the first text on toxicology, titled Industrial
Poisons in the United States. Nine years later, in nineteen
thirty four, she wrote another text book, Industrial Toxicology. The
year after Industrial Toxicology was first published, Hamilton's time at
(19:51):
Harvard ended because she reached mandatory retirement age. In the
sixteen years that she was there, she was never promoted
beyond the title of assistant professor, and instead had been
employed on a series of three year contracts that renewed
over and over. After leaving Harvard, Hamilton's who was sixty
six at the time, hadn't actually retired from her life's work.
She moved to Haadline, Connecticut with her sister, Margaret, who
(20:14):
like all four of the Hamilton's sisters, had not married,
and Alice continued to consult on the topic of toxicology
in industrial settings, including acting as an advisor to New
York State Industrial Commissioner Francis Perkins. Even outside of consulting,
Dr Hamilton's stayed busy. In y three, she wrote her autobiography,
exploring the Dangerous Trades. She revised her textbook Industrial Toxicology
(20:38):
in nineteen forty nine when she was eighty, and as
Joseph McCarthy stirred up the Second Red Scare in the
U S and the late forties and early fifties, she
spoke out against it. At that point she was in
her eighties. That activism continued into her nineties, when she
wrote to President Kennedy to urge him to get American
troops out of Vietnam. On February nineteen sixty nine, Hamilton's
(21:00):
celebrated her one dred birthday the following year. She died
on September twenty, nineteen seventy, after having a stroke. Three
months after her death, on December seventy, the Occupational Safety
and Health Act of nineteen seventy became law. It's opening
paragraph reads an Act to assure safe and healthful working
(21:21):
conditions for working men and women, by authorizing enforcement of
the standards, development of the Act, by assisting and encouraging
the States and their efforts to assure safe and healthful
working conditions, by providing for research, information, education, and training
in the field of occupational safety and health, and for
other purposes. Yes, so that was kind of the culmination
(21:42):
of her life's work, and she just missed seeing it
happened by a few months. Today, the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention give out the Alice B. Hamilton Awards
for Occupational Safety and Health, and on her birthday in
ninety seven, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
Ridge Avenue Facility in Cincinnati, Ohio was dedicated to her
memory and named the Alice Hamilton's Laboratory for Occupational Safety
(22:06):
and Health. In two thousand two, the American Chemical Society
designated Alice Hamilton's and her work in industrial medicine a
National Historic Chemical Landmark. And to close, I wanted to
offer up a fairly famous quote from Dr Allis Hamilton's autobiography,
and it reads, quote, I chose medicine not because I
was scientifically minded, for I was deeply ignorant of science.
(22:28):
I chose it because as a doctor, I could go
anywhere I pleased, too far off lands or to city slums,
and be quite sure I could be of use anywhere.
That's such a great sentiment, it is. And it's like
her heaps me too. Uh. One of the things that
I think is really interesting about her story is that
it's sort of it shows how when there's progress in
(22:50):
some field, it's not like there's a switch that gets
flipped where everything is fixed now, like the Radium girls
were after this, and like I think she was part
of some of the investigation of that, and like that
was well after Illinois had passed laws related to this.
Like it's it's an example of sort of the trajectory
(23:12):
of things that that take a while. And of course
there are plenty of occupational issues that still exists today. Yeah.
In her autobiography, which we mentioned was written in the forties,
there's a funny moment where she talks about how, like
to her, it's almost amusing that people started using like
the the safety first wording, when she's like, when I
(23:33):
started doing this, that would have been like an athema
nobody would have said those words. So she was seeing
the progress and could appreciate her impact even if she
did not get to see that the Osha law finally
signed into reality. That law is older than I thought
it was. Yeah, yeah, it's one of those things I
think people don't always know, like the origin point for OSHA,
(23:56):
Like we used that acronym as a word all the time,
but when you really think about, like someone had to
go and investigate all of these things into trumine, that
there was a very clear link between some of the
work that was happening and some of the illnesses that
were resulting, uh and document all of it so that
there could be a clear case made. And it was
largely uh, you know, her instigating it in the United
(24:18):
States at least, there was, as we mentioned, uh, stuff
going on in other parts of the globe where they
had already begun that kind of research. But Alice Hamilton
sure love her. I also noticed, in case anyone's curious,
when you look at biographies of her, uh, she isn't
very often addressed as Dr Alice Hamilton's and I think
that's because she didn't go into practice as a medical doctor,
(24:40):
but instead took this research route, but she did finish
medical school and wasn't empty, so we kind of switched
a little bit and included it periodically just to remind people. Um,
but I don't think she went by Dr Hamilton's on
the regular in her day to day life. Do you
have some listener mail to take us out? I do,
and it's actually about an episode that you did. But
(25:00):
it's a piece of physical male so I thought I
would read it so you would get to hear it
since you're not here in Atlanta. Uh. It starts Hello,
Holly and Tracy. I was delighted to hear your episode
on Juliette Gordon Lowe. I've been a Girl Scout troop
leader for three years, but have been involved for about
eight years. I have two daughters and Girl Scouts. It
is a major part of our lives. I love the
program and I've seen my girls grow and developed through
(25:22):
the various levels of scouting. Girl Scouting has also allowed
me and my girls to travel with our troops through
selling cookies. We have traveled to places that we could
never have gone on our own family budget. This was
such a fun episode for me to listen to you
as a girl Scout leader. Part of Girl Scouting is
teaching the girls the history of how Girl Scouts started
and who Juliette Gordon Lowe was. I have learned many
(25:43):
of the stories you shared about Juliette's life, but it
was also interesting to hear other tidbits that get left out.
I love Juliette Gordon Lowe and what she started. I'm
inspired by her life because she was in her fifties
before truly finding out what she loved. As somebody who
just turned forty and still figuring out what life has
a store for me, I looked to her to see
that big things still await you even when you are older.
(26:05):
I love that sentiment as well. I haven't closed a
print of my favorite Juliet Gordon low quote, and I
love this quote because of all the work I do
with young girls and teenagers through the Girl Scouts. I
also think it is the perfect quote for a history podcast.
Thank you so much for the research you do and
the entertaining episodes you and your team produce. I love
your podcast. I've listened for years and I've always wanted
to send you something. I'm glad I finally had the
(26:26):
perfect reason to write in and share uh yours and
girl Scouting Samantha, And she also writes ps Tracy wants
a girl Scout, Always a girl scout. It's one of
our sayings. And she wrote sent us to prints that
just have a cute quote. This is the work of
today as the history of tomorrow, and we are its makers.
I love it so Thank you so much, Samantha, because
(26:49):
we agree. Juliet Gordon Low is pretty cool, and the
Scouts do a lot of good work. And I really
really like the beautiful Prince again. The idea that you
can find your life is calling it any age, me too.
If you would like to write to us, you can
do so at History Podcast at how stove works dot com.
You can also find us pretty much everywhere on social
media as Missed in History and Missed in History dot
(27:11):
Com is our website where you can come and see
and listen to every episode that's ever existed. If you
would like to subscribe to the podcast, we would like
you to subscribe to the podcast. You can do that
on the I Heart Radio app, at Apple Podcasts, or
wherever it is you listen to podcasts. Stuffy. Missed in
(27:33):
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