Hamilton, Alice (1869–1970)

Alice Hamilton's groundbreaking epidemiologic studies investigating the occupational exposures of workers to poisonous substances used in manufacturing were critical to the development of the field of industrial toxicology and epidemiology. Hamilton's work contributed to the development of regulations enforcing healthier conditions in America's workplaces. Her career powerfully illustrates how epidemiologic research can stimulate and inspire scientific inquiry to serve the public good.

Hamilton was born in 1869 to a close-knit, patrician family in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Trained as a physician in the medical department of the University of Michigan, she joined the faculty at the Woman's Medical School of Northwestern University in Chicago as professor of pathology in 1897. For 22 years, Hamilton was a resident of Hull House, a famous American settlement in Chicago founded to connect the privileged classes and the socially disadvantaged, and this experience cultivated her interest in service and activism. She found her life's work in 1910, when she was invited to lead a state-funded study of industrial diseases, the first large-scale study of this type. She went on to conduct epidemiologic research of industrial diseases as a special investigator for the federal Bureau of Labor from 1911 until her final report in 1940 (see Table 1).

In 1919, Hamilton became Harvard University's first woman professor when she was invited to join the newly created Department of Industrial Hygiene at Harvard Medical School, a position she held until her retirement in 1935. Her professional work in public health continued until she was 80, and a new edition of her textbook Industrial Toxicology was published in 1949. Three months after Alice Hamilton died at age 101 in 1970, Congress passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act.