Alice Evans

Alice Evans (1881-1975) was a pioneering scientist who established that humans contract the once-common, painful disease brucellosis from raw cow and goat milk. She lobbied successfully for the pasteurization of all milk and lived to see the disease fall into obscurity.

For years, her findings were scorned and ignored because of her gender and because she did not have a doctorate degree. Evans contracted brucellosis while doing research, and suffered from the disease for 30 years. Brucellosis, a recurrent disease also known as Malta or undulant fever, causes shooting pain in the joints, fever, and depression.

Science Prodigy

Alice Evans was born January 29, 1881, to William Howell and Anne B. Evans in rural Neath, a northern Pennsylvania town to which her grandparents had immigrated from Wales in 1831. She attended local elementary schools with her brother, Morgan, and graduated in a class of seven from the Susquehanna Collegiate Institute of Towanda, Pennsylvania, in 1901.

Lacking the money for college tuition, Evans reluctantly took a job teaching grade school, which was one of the few career options available to women at the time. She taught for four years until her brother told her about a free two-year nature study course for teachers at Cornell University's College of Agriculture. She attended the course, then stayed on to complete a Bachelor of Science degree in agriculture. Evans chose the relatively new field of bacteriology-the study of one-celled microorganisms-as her area of major emphasis. She was aided by a scholarship and by a tuition waiver underscoring the college's commitment to training leaders for the nation's agricultural industry.

Encouraged by her professor of dairy bacteriology at Cornell, Evans received a scholarship in bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin. This scholarship had never before been awarded to a woman. One of Evans' professors at the University of Wisconsin was Elmer V. McCollum, who later became famous for discovering Vitamin A. In 1910, Evans was awarded a Master of Science degree from the University of Wisconsin.

Her professors urged her to continue on for a doctoral degree, and Evans later continued her studies at George Washington University and the University of Chicago. However, she never completed her Ph.D., although she was awarded honorary degrees from the University of Wisconsin, the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, and Wilson College. Eventually she became so respected in her field that most of her colleagues called her "doctor," even without the degree. In 1928, she was elected the first woman president of the Society of American Bacteriologists.

Discovered Life's Work

By a stroke of luck, Evans was hired by Professor E.G. Hastings of the University of Wisconsin to work as a bacteriologist on a team developing an improved flavor for cheddar cheese, one of Wisconsin's primary industries. Technically the position was a Federal civil service post, working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Dairy Division of the Bureau of Animal Industry. Because space was limited while the bureau's main offices were being built in Washington, D. C., research was temporarily being carried out at several agricultural experiment stations at state universities. The USDA payed the salaries of the investigators and the state provided laboratory space and support.

After three years, Evans moved to Washington D.C. to work in the dairy division of the USDA's Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI). She found herself to be the only woman scientist employed in that particular department. Evans quickly gathered that the Washington staff was shocked that a state experiment station had hired a woman. Evans accidentally became the first woman scientist to hold a permanent appointment there. She would later recall in her memoirs, cited in John Parascandola's article in Public Health Reports, that "according to hearsay, when the bad news broke at a meeting of BAI officials that a woman scientist was coming to join their staff, they were filled with consternation. In the words of a stenographer who was present, they almost fell off their chairs."

Evans joined a team of scientists studying the sources from which bacteria entered dairy products. In addition, she took on the project that would become her life's work, studying the bacteria present in fresh cow's milk. She quickly identified a similarity between two bacteria: the organism that causes spontaneous abortion in cows (Bang's disease), and the organism that causes brucellosis in goats. Her discovery proved that humans could get sick from milk contaminated by bacteria living in cows. She announced her discovery in 1917 at the Society of American Bacteriologists. Her results were published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases the following year. The author of Evans' obituary in the Washington Post called the discovery "one of the most outstanding in the field of medical science in the first quarter of this century," but it was years before her findings were accepted by the scientific establishment and action taken. Paul De Kruif summed up the attitude of Evans' colleagues in his book Men Against Death, published in 1932. "If Evans were right," he imagined the scientists of the day as reasoning, "somebody much more outstanding than Evans would have run onto it long before. Such," De Kruif stated, "is the silliness of scientists."