Connecticut Vanguards by Eric D. Lehman

Author:Eric D. Lehman [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: INscribe Digital
Published: 2018-10-31T20:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

ALICE HAMILTON

FARSIGHTED SCIENTIST

In October 1886, seventeen-year-old Alice Hamilton arrived at Miss Porter’s School for Young Ladies in Farmington, Connecticut. Originally from Fort Wayne, Indiana, she joined her older sister Edith and made friends with a rich girl from New York named Katharine Ludington. All three would excel at this groundbreaking school with no grades or exams and go on to be part of the first generation of college-educated women in the country, a generation that would transform the cultural and social landscape of America.

Though young Alice spoke of her crush on a handsome neighbor, she knew even as a teen that most boys were not smart enough for her. Besides, like many educated women in the late nineteenth century, she believed that she would have to choose between familial happiness and education. She consciously chose education, aspiring to be a doctor, a profession, as she said, “of use anywhere.” It was actually a growing field for women; at the time, there were 4,500 female doctors in the States. However, when Alice told Miss Porter she wanted to be a doctor, the famous educator was not exactly encouraging, treating it as “amusing childish whim.”

She ignored this advice and after two years of hard work graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1893, continuing her education with internships in Minneapolis and Roxbury, Massachusetts, which reminded her of Farmington. “In the distance, the Blue Hills looking very like our Farmington hills,” she said fondly. At first nervous about working in a hospital laboratory, she soon took to it wholeheartedly, pushing through strict Victorian social conventions when medical necessities required. She was always busy but found time to write letters to her sister on prescription pads. “The work is fine,” she said, “but it is a pretty lonely, desolate sort of life.”

She decided against medical practice, turning instead to research. “I must do scientific work,” she said firmly at the time. She tried her hand at bacteriology, taking classes first in Michigan and then in Germany near her sister Edith, who was studying the classics. However, she found the local cultural attitudes “hypocritical” and her own proclivity for bacteriology less than she had hoped. She tried postgraduate studies in pathology at Johns Hopkins next. But something was missing, some vision aching in the back of her mind. She could not quite see it yet.

In 1897, she took a job as professor of pathology at Northwestern University’s Woman’s Medical School. She became a member and resident at Chicago’s Hull House, founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr as a social experiment. She became Jane Addams’s doctor and taught classes at the house, including English, art and men’s fencing. She also ran the baby clinic and worked as a visiting physician. But she was not satisfied, speaking of “a series of failures to look back on and not only individual failures but one great fundamental one.” The great fundamental failure in her mind was being thirty years old and not yet finding her calling.

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