Martha May Eliot
Martha May Eliot (April 7, 1891 – February 14, 1978), was a foremost pediatrician and specialist in public health, an assistant director for WHO, and an architect of New Deal and postwar programs for maternal and child health. Her first important research, community studies of rickets in New Haven, Connecticut, and Puerto Rico, explored issues at the heart of social medicine. Together with Edwards A. Park, her research established that public health measures (dietary supplementation with vitamin D) could prevent and reverse the early onset of rickets.[1]
Martha May Eliot
April 7, 1891
February 14, 1978 (aged 86)
Johns Hopkins University, 1918
National Children's Bureau Division of Child and Maternal Health
Harvard School of Public HealthPersonal life[edit]
Martha May Eliot shared her personal life in a long emotional and domestic partnership with Ethel Collins Dunham, also a pioneering female pediatrician, who was made the first female member of the American Pediatric Society and was awarded its highest award, the Howland Medal, in 1957.
Lillian Faderman, the landmark scholar, writes: "[At] Bryn Mawr.. she met a twenty-six year old freshman, Ethel Dunham. From 1910 to Ethel's death in 1978, the two women were inseparable. As a couple, Martha Eliot and Ethel Dunham.. succeeded in times that were as unsympathetic to professional women as they were to lesbians. Their domestic satisfaction crept constantly into Martha's letters back home: "E. keeps me out doors which is great. This P.M. we are going canoeing. Tonight we are having supper here - oyster omelet, a concoction of Ethel's - and apple sauce and toast and nutbread." "
Their partnership nourished and sustained them through their entire adult lives.
In the 1970s, during Martha's travels for WHO, they wrote day after day: "Dearest, it was hard to say goodbye and I shall miss you terribly.. Ever and ever so much love, my darling"; "How I count the time until you do arrive. I miss you my darling".[5]
Bert Hansen writes: "While Dunham and Eliot are each worthy of individual attention, their shared personal life has such an intimate connection with their careers that a combined narrative better illustrates their close relationship of 59 years. They achieved major professional positions at Yale, at Harvard, and in government, even while they were making careful career choices to maintain the continuity of their domestic partnership. Each was also accorded public honors for leadership in pediatrics, child welfare, and public health."[7]
Dr. Eliot's service to public health earned her many honors. In 1951, President Truman named her chief of the Children's Bureau. In 1947, she became the first woman elected president of the American Public Health Association. She also was the first woman to receive APHA's Sedgwick Memorial Medal.
The American Public Health Association established the Martha May Eliot Award in 1964 to honor extraordinary health service to mothers and children; to bring such achievement to the eyes of related professional people and the public; to stimulate young people in the field to emulate efforts resulting in such recognition; and to add within the profession and in the eyes of the public to the stature of professional workers in the field of maternal and child health.[8]