Alice Hamilton was born in Manhattan, New York City, into a prominent family that would later relocate to Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Alice Hamilton was born on February 27, 1869, in Manhattan, New York City, the second of five children of Montgomery and Gertrude Pond Hamilton. Her family soon relocated to Fort Wayne, Indiana, where she was raised in an intellectually rigorous but somewhat sheltered household typical of upper-middle-class America in the Gilded Age.
Educated largely at home and later at Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut, Hamilton developed an early fascination with science, partly as a means of achieving financial independence, since women of her class were rarely encouraged toward professional careers. Her family, especially her cousin Agnes Hamilton and her sister, the classicist Edith Hamilton, fostered a household of unusual intellectual ambition for women of the era.
This early life set the stage for a woman who would go on to become the founder of the field of industrial medicine in the United States and the first woman appointed to the faculty of Harvard Medical School. Her birth in 1869 places her development squarely within the Progressive Era, whose reform movements she would later come to embody through her groundbreaking work on occupational disease.
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