Martha May Eliot: “Spinster in Steel Specs, Adviser on Maternity”

Abstract

PEDIATRICIAN MARTHA MAY ELIOT was associated with the Children’s Bureau for over 20 years. When criticizing her role and the influence of the Children’s Bureau, and even when noting Eliot’s remarkable achievements, commentators frequently questioned her authority as an “unmarried expert” on child health. Despite the rather hostile environment in which she worked, Eliot went on to receive many well-deserved honors. The American Pediatric Society gave her its highest award, the John Howland Medal, in 1967. Martha May Eliot was born in Dorchester, Mass, in 1891, to Christopher Rhodes Eliot, a Unitarian minister, and Mary Jackson May. She was a first cousin of the poet T. S. Eliot. Her grandfather, William G. Eliot, was the first chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis. Eliot majored in classical literature at Radcliffe College and also completed premedical training. During a year’s study at Bryn Mawr College she met Ethel Collins Dunham, who was to become her life partner.1 After completing their undergraduate education, the two enrolled at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1914. Eliot and Dunham planned to take medical internships together, but only Dunham was accepted at Hopkins, making her the first female intern in the Pediatrics Department. The department chair, John Howland, refused to admit more than one woman. Eliot instead went to Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, Boston, and then completed a residency in pediatrics at St. Louis Children’s Hospital from 1919 to 1920.2 Figure 1 In 1921, Eliot was invited to become the first chief resident in Edwards A. Park’s new Department of Pediatrics at Yale Medical School, working at New Haven Hospital. In 1924, she was named director of the Children’s Bureau’s Division of Child and Maternal Health. Park encouraged her to commute to Washington for one week a month while continuing her duties at New Haven. Eliot and Park also began a 3-year study of the prevention of rickets and presented their preliminary results, excerpted in this selection, to the American Medical Association in 1925. As a result of this study, they recommended cod-liver oil and sunlight as effective measures to prevent this deforming disease of childhood. As a consequence, rickets, once prevalent, became much less common in America. When Eliot was appointed assistant chief of the Children’s Bureau in 1934, she moved to Washington full-time, and a year later left her position as associate professor at Yale Medical School. Dunham also joined the bureau in 1935, as director of child development.2(p 174) During World War II, Eliot traveled to England to study the impact of wartime evacuation on young children. She published her report Civil Defense Measures for the Protection of Children in 1942. She was also a leading figure in war work at home and ran the Emergency Maternity and Infant Care Program, providing medical assistance to the families of 1.5 million American soldiers. Eliot received the Lasker Award for this work in 1948. After World War II, Eliot served on the US delegation to the first-ever World Health Assembly, and she was the only woman to sign the founding document of the World Health Organization (WHO). In 1949, she moved to Geneva to serve as assistant director general of the WHO. As one of few women ever to hold such high office in a public health agency, she faced intense scrutiny of her professional qualifications as well as her personal circumstances; a newspaper headline announcing the appointment described her as a “spinster in steel specs, adviser on maternity.”3(p 25) Two years later, she returned to the Children’s Bureau as its chief. Eliot left the Children’s Bureau in 1956, and in 1957 she became chair of the Department of Child and Maternal Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. After retiring in 1960, she continued her work for the WHO and UNICEF, reporting on medical education in Asia and Africa. In 1947, she was the first woman to be elected president of the American Public Health Association (APHA). In 1964, the APHA established the Martha May Eliot Award to recognize outstanding achievements in the field of maternal and child health care. Eliot died in Cambridge, Mass, on February 14, 1978, nine years after the death of her partner.