Alice Hamilton was 93 when she signed a letter protesting US military involvement in Vietnam, but that was in 1964, a year before the historic teach-in at the University and shortly before her death.
Hamilton was born in New York in 1869 and grew up in Indiana. She received her medical degree from Michigan in 1893. This summer, a postage stamp was issued honoring Hamilton for her efforts to protect the health of industrial workers and for being the first female member of the faculty of Harvard University.
In 1919, after living for 22 years at the Hull House settlement in Chicago, Hamilton was appointed assistant professor in a new industrial hygiene program at Harvard’s Medical Schools and School of Public Health.
According to the Harvard Gazette, many males objected to her appointment, two conditions of which were that she was barred from the Faculty Club and ineligible for complimentary faculty football tickets. Harvard refused to accept women as public health students for 26 years after her appointment.
Hamilton published the first American textbook on industrial toxins, Industrial Poisons in the United States, and was a pioneer in revealing the dangers to workers of lead and of substances used in the rubber and munitions industries. She also traced work-related injuries of stonecutters and masons to the use of jackhammers, and showed that carbon monoxide emissions in steel mills were eroding workers’ health.
After her retirement, Hamilton served as a consultant to the US Department of Labor. Her survey of the rayon industry led to passage of Pennsylvania’s first workers’ compensation law for occupational diseases. While serving as president of the National Consumers League, she published her autobiography, Exploring the Dangerous Trades.
The Alice Hamilton stamp is part of the Great American series. In ceremonies introducing the stamp, Harvard Dean of Public Health Harvey Fineberg said Hamilton "was the first physician to use the scientific approach to study threats to health in the workplace."
. . . October 1995
Alice Hamilton was 93 when she signed a letter protesting US military involvement in Vietnam, but that was in 1964, a year before the historic teach-in at the University and shortly before her death.