A preventable mass poisoning
Alice Hamilton, an exceptional and tenacious physician born in 1869, created the field of worker health in the United States. She grew up in a cultured family in Fort Wayne, Indiana; her sister Edith became a best-selling author on Greek and Roman thought. Dr. Hamilton joined the social justice advocate Jane Addams’s Hull House Settlement in Chicago. There she met a who’s who of reformers and intellectuals, including the suffragist Susan B. Anthony, the education reformer John Dewey, the activist Mother Jones, future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, prominent socialist Eugene V. Debs, and Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle — a book largely responsible for the first food safety measures in the United States. Support for workers was integral to Hull House, where, Hamilton wrote, “one got into the labor movement as a matter of course, without realizing how or when.”
Hamilton used the superpower of surveillance to see past obvious injuries and find invisible toxins. Mangled arms and lost fingers were dramatic but harmed far fewer workers than “the less spectacular hazard of sickness from some industrial poison.” She wrote: “Accidents in industry are striking, dramatic, and the cause is clear, while occupational disease comes on slowly and insidiously, and the responsibility [of the companies employing the workers] is more easily evaded.”
Hamilton was meticulous. She searched for every case and reviewed every step in industrial production processes to identify how exposures occurred and figure out how to stop them. Challenged by a factory owner who believed that none of his workers had developed lead poisoning, she scoured local hospitals, spoke with social workers, and visited pharmacists. She identified 22 workers who had left the factory due to disability from lead poisoning and therefore were invisible to the factory owner. Hamilton advocated for government regulation and organized worker action to reduce risks. When neither regulation nor worker demands were possible, she used astonishing tact to persuade factory owners and managers to implement safety procedures. Hamilton made factory owners see invisible cases and take action to prevent them; the U.S. government would be much harder to convince.
Hamilton investigated and controlled lead poisoning and other hazards in workplaces for decades. She had become the first woman appointed to the faculty of Harvard University when, on October 26, 1924, severe illness struck workers at a Standard Oil Company lab in New Jersey. The lab had been developing processes to add lead to gasoline. Within a week, 40 of 49 workers were either dead or severely ill. The deaths triggered intense media attention. Despite initial denials from the company, which blamed the illness on alcoholism or other worker behaviors, investigation revealed that the cause was lead poisoning. In the aftermath, hearings investigated the potential risks of adding lead to gasoline.