Exploring the Dangerous Trades With Dr Alice Hamilton

Abstract

A FEW MONTHS AFTER THE ARMISTICE WAS SIGNED and World War I came to a screeching halt, a 50year-old physician named Alice Hamilton received an assignment from the US Department of Labor. She was to investigate the working conditions of copper miners in Arizona, many of whom had sustained various hand and finger injuries from the overuse of air jackhammers, a problem she had already studied in stonecutters. She was also to assess the miners’ exposure to poisonous arseniureted hydrogen gases. Predictably, in an era when profit was paramount and the health of those who toiled in the industrial beehive a distant second, she was not warmly welcomed by the men who controlled the mining camps. As Hamilton recalled: “There were no neutrals anywhere . . . I asked the hotel clerk . . . about physicians in the camp, or lawyers, or clergymen, whom I could interview, only to be told: ‘All the doctors here are copper . . . the lawyers are copper too . . . most of the ministers are copper’” (pp 210211). Undaunted, Hamilton put on overalls and a miner’s cap, crawled and stooped through the labyrinthine spaces, bumped her head repeatedly on the low “ceiling” of the mines, and crossed precipitously deep pits on rails “which were so far apart I felt sure I could fall between them” (p 217). This is just one of hundreds of episodes worth reading and relishing in Alice Hamilton’s memoir, Exploring the Dangerous Trades. The book first appeared to critical acclaim and popular sales in 1943 but is currently out of print (although reprint editions and library copies are available). But it is her attention to detail about the specific conditions, people, causes, events, and social injustices she encountered both personally and professionally that make this volume such an illuminating historical document. Take, for example, her recollections of that 1919 copper mining investigation in Arizona. One night, in the Mexican border town Ajo, Hamilton had no choice but to sleep in a shed consisting of 2 rows of “rooms” separated by a passageway. “The rooms were really much more like horse stalls,” she writes, “the walls were only about eight feet high, having a free space above, and there was no door, only a heavy canvas curtain. However, the very casualness was reassuring, and after all the room was as much shut in as a Pullman berth. Anyway our night was very much undisturbed and we woke to see sunrise over the desert” (p 212). This dutifully recorded recollection may well have been a personal reminder that she was not always so lucky. During her career, she snuck into factories against the wishes of their owners, treated workers to beers in saloons after their shifts to learn about their work, and exposed herself to multiple hardships and risks. On at least one occasion, while sleeping in an unlocked mining shack, she was mistaken for a prostitute. A modest Hamilton shrugged her shoulders as she told an oral historian about these incidents in 1963, “I used to have to do those things.” Indeed, she did. Probably no individual was more instrumental in warning Americans about the health risks of the workplace than Alice Hamilton. During the first decades of the 20th century, few physicians were willing to engage in the intense political, scientific, and economic battles necessary to keep workers safe and healthy. Elite academic physicians had bigger intellectual fish to fry; and, for those in private practice, such pursuits simply did not pay enough. But for a woman trying to carve out a niche in medicine, it was a unique opportunity. During her distinguished career, Hamilton wrote dozens of seminal monographs that remain classics of scientific concision and investigative elegance. The list of topics she tackled reads like a murderer’s row of dangerous working conditions once the norm for laborers in this country. She inspected pottery plants, smelters, printing plants, steel mills, mines, and munitions factories and scientifically demonstrated the health risks of lead, carbon monoxide, phosphorus, benzene, picric acid, and various other toxic substances that permeated many workplaces. In so doing, she helped prevent countless cases of lead poisoning, benzeneinduced malignancies, black lung disease, anemia, munitions factory mishaps, and other toxic exposures. Hamilton’s curriculum vitae provides a sterling illustration of the modern medical scientist at the fin de siecle. It is all the more remarkable considering she was entering her