A Deadly Invention and the Woman Who Battled for Environmental Justice
Starred review from January 6, 2025
Science writer Stone (Sinkable) offers an enthralling biography of Alice Hamilton (1869–1970), who led a prescient but failed battle to ban leaded gasoline in the 1920s. A medical doctor interested in pathology, by her early 30s Hamilton had “singlehandedly” created the field of industrial medicine, the study of the impacts of chemicals and other environmental factors on industrial workers. As the first woman offered an appointment at Harvard, she began documenting cases of dementia, palsy, and early death in workers—and found they were all connected to lead exposure. This put her on a collision course with engineer Thomas Midgly Jr., inventor of leaded gasoline, a cheaper and more efficient fuel that was quickly adopted by the burgeoning automobile industry. Hamilton led the crusade against leaded gas, offering studies that proved “lead was harmful in almost any context... to every bodily organ.” The U.S. surgeon general called a 1925 summit to investigate the matter; Stone paints the proceedings as a masterpiece of manipulation by Midgly’s Ethyl Corporation, which lied and obfuscated its way to victory. (Leaded gasoline wasn’t fully banned until 1996.) Stone’s depiction of Hamilton is a captivating portrait of a privileged daughter of wealth whose eyes are slowly opened to capitalism’s exploitation of the poor (“I had begun to realize how narrow had been my education, how sheltered my life. I wanted to go into that underworld and see for myself,” she later wrote). Readers will be riveted.