Alice Hamilton's Crusade

            During the early part of the 1900's, the industrial workplace was considered extremely unsafe and unsanitary under today's standards. Dr. Alice Hamilton was a pioneer in the industrial toxicology field for the first part of the century, and she set out to revolutionize the safety and well being of workers in the workplace. She would help break new ground for professional women as well.
             Alice Hamilton had many reasons for beginning her crusade based on her own experiences. She had grown up in Chicago, where she had lived for 22 years. In her autobiography, Exploring Dangerous Trades, she is quoted saying, "Living in a working-class quarter, coming in contact with laborers and their wives, I could fail to hear tales of the dangers workingmen faced." On main reason was she didn't want other people to grow up and live in the same conditions she and her friends and family had. Her interest in workers" health grew when she read two proactive texts in 1907. A muckraking article by William Hard described the absence of adequate workman's compensation, while Sir Thomas Oliver's book, Dangerous Trades, also impacted her curiosity of the matter.
             To get started she first received her M.D. degree from the University of Michigan in 1893. She had studied bacteriology and pathology there, and also at the universities of Leipzig and Munich, and Johns Hopkins University. Once she was educated and felt she could truly make a difference one of her methods to help involved some gumshoe detective work. She would walk through the working-class neighborhoods talking to doctors, labor organizers, and priests. She felt that the labor approach to her studies involving many people was most effective. Hamilton read hospital records, talked to sick workers at home, and inspected factories. During this process she identified over 70 processes that exposed workers to lead poisoning alone.
             Dr. Alice Hamilton was and still is viewed as a very important and influential person in American history.