American Poison
A Deadly Invention and the Woman Who Battled for Environmental Justice
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- 9,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
From the national bestselling author of The Food Explorer comes the untold story of Alice Hamilton, a trailblazing doctor and public health activist who took on the booming auto industry—and the deadly invention of leaded gasoline, which would poison millions of people across America.
At noon on October 27, 1924, a factory worker was admitted to a hospital in New York City, suffering from hallucinations and convulsions. Before breakfast the next day, he was dead. Alice Hamilton was determined to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.
By the time of the accident, Hamilton had pioneered the field of industrial medicine in the United States. She specialized in workplace safety years before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was created. She was the first female professor at Harvard. She spent decades inspecting factories and mines. But this time, she was up against a formidable new foe: America’s relentless push for progress, regardless of the cost.
The 1920s were an exciting decade. Industry was booming. Labor was flourishing. Automobiles were changing roads, cities, and nearly all parts of American life. And one day, an ambitious scientist named Thomas Midgley Jr. triumphantly found just the right chemical to ensure that this boom would continue. His discovery—tetraethyl leaded gasoline—set him up for great wealth and the sort of fame that would land his name in history books.
Soon, Hamilton would be on a collision course with Midgley, fighting full force against his invention, which poisoned the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the basic structure of our brains.
American Poison is the gripping story of Hamilton’s unsung battle for a healthy planet—and the ramifications that continue to echo today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
