biography
| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1869–1970)
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| biography:
| Physician and social reformer, born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA, the sister of Edith Hamilton. A pioneer in industrial toxicology and a nonconformist who valued personal liberty above all else, she became a leading American authority on lead poisoning and one of the handful of worldwide specialists on industrial diseases by 1916. Her reports on lead, and later on rubber and munitions, led to improved safety standards nationwide. The product of an intellectually stimulating if socially protected environment, she chose medicine as the only way to be both independent and socially useful. It was during her more than a decade as a resident of Chicago's famous settlement house, Hull House, and her ensuing friendship with reformer Jane Addams, that she coupled scientific research with her latent reformist zeal. Focusing on industrial diseases, she became a special investigator for the United States Bureau of Labor (1911), Harvard University's first professor of public health (1925), and she eventually published numerous studies on industrial toxicology, several books, and an autobiography. |
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