BLS and Alice Hamilton: pioneers in industrial health - occupational health and safety researcher biography

Monthly Labor Review, June, 1986 by William T. Moye

BLS and Alice Hamilton: pioneers in industrial health

In September 1910, Alice Hamilton, chief medical examiner for the Illinois State Commission on Occupational Diseases, was in Brussels attending the International Congress on Occupational Diseases, at which the Belgian delegate dismissed U.S. activities in the field of industrial hygiene with the comment, "*ea n'existe pas [They do not exist]'.1 But that condition had already begun to change, and at the International Congress, Hamilton met Charles P. Neill, Commissioner of Labor, one of the persons primarily responsible for the recent surge in publicity on industrial poisons. Shortly thereafter, Hamilton accepted Neill's proposal that she undertake investigations for the Bureau of Labor, launching a decade of cooperation in which she studied diseases and hazards associated with the lead, explosives, pottery, and dye industries.

Early career

Hamilton was born in New York City in 1869, but was raised in Fort Wayne, IN, one of four sisters with a much younger brother. From her youth, she was determined to be useful. Indeed, at one point, she hoped to become a medical missionary in Persia.2 In her activities, she was able to combine her medical work with humanitarian services.

Upon graduation from medical school at the University of Michigan in 1893, she worked at hospitals in Minneapolis and Boston before returning to Michigan for graduate work. Then she went to Europe for a year of study, followed by a year at Johns Hopkins. In 1897, she accepted a teaching position in Chicago and made the crucial decision to live at Hull House, a settlement house where she found "an intense and humane concern for people, especially for those who had small chance in this world.'3 There she found activities that married her research interests with social concerns.

During a typhoid epidemic in 1902, Hamilton surveyed homes in the Hull House district, capturing flies around open, undrained privies. When her tests confirmed the presence of the typhoid bacillus, she published the results of her research in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and along with other Hull House residents, urged the Chicago Board of Health to clean up the area.4

In 1908, Hamilton published her first article on industrial hygiene in Charities and The Commons.5 She had to turn to Great Britain and Europe for information on the subject, "as there is so little available in our own country where we are still too much absorbed in the industrial battle to stop and take stock of the killed and wounded.'6 Later that year, Charles S. Deneen, governor of Illinois, appointed the Illinois Commission on Occupational Diseases--Hamilton and eight men. She served on the commission for about 2 years, resigning to accept the post of medical investigator for the Commission's Survey of Occupational Diseases.

Hamilton later wrote that her visit to European factories in 1911 had been an eye-opener. She had previously thought that U.S. factories provided better working conditions and that American workers enjoyed better health and, therefore, less industrial poisoning. However, after studying the sickness records and dwellings of English and German workers, she realized that she had found "a far larger number of cases' during her Illinois surveys.7

According to Hamilton, when she entered the industrial-hygiene field, "You could have counted the published articles on industrial poisoning on the fingers of one hand.' Employers eager to improve conditions could find but little advice from medical experts. Many supervisors simply relied on a large floating pool of foreigners and a high labor turnover rate to cut exposure time in hazardous trades.8

Efforts at the Bureau

Carroll D. Wright, first chief of the Bureau, had commissioned the first Federal report on industrial hygiene and published it in 1903. But the American awakening came later as part of the national push for social and economic reform known as the "Progressive Movement.' Bureau activity in industrial hygiene was further spurred by the assumption of administrative functions under the Federal employees' compensation act of 1908. Neill placed special emphasis on industrial health and safety issues, and the Bureau participated in and encouraged research on these issues.

In 1909, the Bureau cooperated with the American Association for Labor Legislation in examining the effects of white phosphorus in the production of matches. The subsequent report, published by the Bureau in 1910, spurred the introduction of legislation banning phosphorus matches from interstate commerce and eventually resulted in passage of a law placing a heavy tax on such matches.9

In accepting Neill's proposal to associate with the Bureau of Labor, Hamilton assumed the title of "special investigator for industrial diseases,' producing first "White-Lead Industry in the United States, With an Appendix on the Lead-Oxide Industry.' She investigated 23 of the 25 U.S. factories known to manufacture white lead and discovered 358 specific cases of lead poisoning, 16 of them fatal, occurring between January 1910 and April 1911.(10) She then moved on to study problems of lead poisoning in potteries, tile works, and porcelain enameled sanitary ware, as well as in the painters' trade.