Martha May Eliot

Martha May Eliot (April 7, 1891 – February 14, 1978), was an American pediatrician. She was a 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.

Biography

Martha May Eliot was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1891, to Christopher Rhodes Eliot, a Unitarian minister, and Mary Jackson May. Her father 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 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.

The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Martha May Eliot and Ethel Collins Dunham, 1915

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.

In 1918, Eliot 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.

She served as the chief architect of health provisions for children in the 1935 US Social Security Act, that mandated that every state establish child health services. In 1946, she served as the vice chair of the US delegation to the International Health Conference and on behalf of the US, signed the constitution that established the World Health Organization (she was the only woman to sign WHO's constitution).

Martha May Eliot died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on February 14, 1978.

Personal life

Martha May Eliot had a long domestic partnership with Ethel Collins Dunham, also a pioneering female pediatrician. They met at Bryn Mawr in 1910 and were together until Dunham's death in 1969.

Awards and honors In 1948, Eliot received the Mary Woodard Lasker Award for Public Service. From 1949 to 1950, she was president of the National Conference of Social Work. She also received the 1967 John Howland Award.