Martha May Eliot

Martha May Eliot (April 7, 1891-February 14, 1978) was a pediatrician and specialist in public health, 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]

Biography

Martha May Eliot was a scion of the Eliot family, an influential American family that is regarded as one of the Boston Brahmins, originating in Boston, whose ancestors became wealthy and held sway over the American education system in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her father, Christopher Rhodes Eliot, was a Unitarian minister, and her grandfather, William G. Eliot, was the first chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis. The poet, playwright, critic, and Nobel laureate T.S. Eliot was her first cousin.

During undergraduate study at Bryn Mawr College she met Ethel Collins Dunham, who was to become her life partner. After completing their undergraduate education, the two enrolled together at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1914.^[2]

In 1918, Elliot graduated from medical school at Johns Hopkins University. As early as her second year of medical school, Dr. Eliot hoped to become "some kind of social doctor." She taught at Yale University's department of pediatrics from 1921 to 1935. For most of these years, Dr. Eliot also directed the National Children's Bureau Division of Child and Maternal Health (1924–1934). She later accepted a full-time position at the bureau, becoming bureau chief in 1951. In 1956, she left the bureau to become department chairman of child and maternal health at Harvard School of Public Health.^[1]

During her tenure at the Children's Bureau, Eliot helped establish government programs that implemented her ideas about social medicine, and she was responsible for drafting most of the Social Security Act's language dealing with maternal and child health. During World War II, she administered the Emergency Maternity and Infant Care program, which provided maternity care for greater than 1 million servicemen's wives. After the war, she held influential positions in both the World Health Organization and United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).^[1] In 1959, Martha accepted a post as chair of the Massachusetts Commission on Children and Youth, a position she held for a decade.^[3]

Martha Jane Eliot shared her personal life in a long domestic partnership with Ethel Collins Dunham, also a pediatrician. 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."^[4]

Awards and honors

Dr. Eliot's service to public health earned her many honors. She was one of the first women admitted into the American Pediatric Society, and she later received that organization's top honor, the John Howland Award. 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.

• 1947 Mary Woodard Lasker Award for Public Service
• 1958 Sedgwick Memorial Medal
• 1967 John Howland Award

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.^[5]

References

1. ^ ^{a b c} "Martha May Eliot, M.D.". Center for Disease Control. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4838a2bx1.htm. Retrieved 2009-06-11. 
2. ^ Parry, Manon S.; Tedeschi, Sara K.; Maksimović, M (Aug 2004). "Martha May Eliot: “Spinster in Steel Specs, Adviser on Maternity”". American Journal of Public Health 94 (8): 1322. doi:10.2105/AJPH.94.8.1322. PMID 1448446. 
3. ^ Cynthia Grant Tucker, No Silent Witness: The Eliot Parsonage Women and their Unitarian World, Oxford University Press, 2010.
4. ^ Hansen, Bert; Lindhe, J (Jan 2002). "Public Careers and Private Sexuality: Some Gay and Lesbian Lives in the History of Medicine and Public Health". American Journal of Public Health 92 (1): 36–44. doi:10.2105/AJPH.92.1.36. PMC 1447383. PMID 11772756. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=1447383. 
5. ^ "Martha May Eliot Award". American Public Health Association. http://www.apha.org/about/awards/marthaeliot/. Retrieved 2009-06-11. 

Persondata
Name	Eliot, Martha May
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1891
Place of birth
Date of death	1978
Place of death