Alan L. Hart

Alan L. Hart was a doctor, writer, and prominent figure in the fields of radiology and tuberculosis control. He was also one of the first people in the U.S. to have surgery in an effort to transition to a different gender than the one he had been assigned at birth.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly Fry And so they
were going to talk about Alan L. Hart, who was
both a doctor and a writer. He became a really

(00:22):
prominent figure in the worlds of radiology and tuberculosis control.
He did a whole lot of work in giving X
rays to people as a screening measure you both before
and after there was a treatment available for tuberculosis, and
this turned out to be extremely important in getting people
into treatment early so that they could be cured before

(00:45):
things got really bad. His novels were also set in
the world of medicine, and a lot of them, you know,
in addition to be interesting stories to read, offered up
some criticism of the discrimination and greed that he felt
had become really rampant and then medical world. His books
also drew from personal experience. He was born and raised
as a girl, but he transitioned to a male identity

(01:08):
in his twenties, and he became one of the first
people in the United States to have surgery and an
effort to transition to a different gender from the one
he had been born to, So let's start with his
early life. He was born Alberta Lucille Hart on October
four Hawsommit, Kansas. His parents were Albert and Edna Hart,
and Alan was an only child. Allen's father died of

(01:31):
typhoid when he was very very young, in so Allen
would have only been too at that time, and he
and his mother moved to Lynn County, Oregon, where Edna's
family lived, and young Allen often reassured his widowed mother
that he would grow up to be a man and
take care of her. He was also interested in medicine
from a very early age. Until he was about four,

(01:52):
he liked to play with dolls, but he didn't really
play with them, and like a mom capacity, it was
more than an imaginative play or he would imagine hospital
scenarios for the dolls that he was playing with. This
was described a little bit later in a case study
by his doctor, Dr J. Alan Gilbert, who used h

(02:12):
as a pseudonym for Alan, and one of the things
that Dr Gilbert said in his case study was this
was a very active child, did a boy's work about
the farm, milked the cows, learned to ride and drive horses.
Liked to listen to the men who came to the place,
discussing politics, agriculture, et cetera. Always played at barn or
in toolhouse unless confined to the house by stormy weather,

(02:34):
when store or hospital was the favorite game. Never played
house or at Being the mother of dolls at age seven,
h refused to play with dolls with small girl visitor
as unless as head and father of the family. He
also regarded himself as a boy and thought that he
would become a boy if only his family would cut
his hair and let him wear boy clothes, and he

(02:56):
felt most comfortable when wearing overalls and other boys clothing. Eventually,
when Alan was about four and a half, Edna remarried
to a man named Bill Barton. When Alan was seven,
the family moved to a farm in Albany, Oregon, which
is about seventy miles south of Portland. And when he
got a little older, he found himself starting to identify

(03:16):
with the male characters rather than the female ones in
the romance novels he would read, and as he reached puberty,
he began to discover that he was attracted to women.
Alan went to Albany College, which later became Lewis and
Clark College, and that started in eight He developed a
somewhat tumultuous relationship with a classmate named Emma Cushman, which

(03:38):
went on for a number of years. In En, he
transferred to Stanford, and he paid Emma's way to go
with him, because she couldn't afford it herself and they
didn't want to be separated. Stanford is not far from
San Francisco, and while San Francisco didn't have the prominent
gay culture then that it does today, remember this was
well before the Stonewall Riots launched the gay rights movement,

(03:59):
and that Castro was really just a quiet, working class neighborhood.
At the time. San Francisco still was a much larger
city and had a very different culture from Albany, and
in this environment, Alan began to dress and act in
what was considered a more typically masculine way. Allen transferred
back to Albany and graduated in nineteen twelve, and unfortunately,

(04:20):
at this point he was really deeply in debt for
a combination of reasons. One one of what he had
developed a gambling habit while at Stanford, and the other
was that he was paying for all of Emma's expenses.
His relationship was also starting to really show some strain.
Some of this was because he really wanted to wear
men's clothing on formal occasions, and Emma wanted him to

(04:40):
wear dresses when they were going out somewhere nice and
also wanted him to behave in a more feminine and
restrained way. So their relationship was really starting to have
some some strain going on. Yeah, he took a year
off and tried to make money as a commercial photographer
in an effort to recover from his debt, but the
combination and a financial and personal stress really took its toll,

(05:03):
and at one point that year, Allen attempted suicide. The
next year, though, he went on to medical school at
the University of Oregon. This later became Oregon Health and
Science University School of Medicine UM. He started his medical
school in nineteen thirteen, and he graduated at the top
of his class in nineteen seventeen, and he received what's
called the Sailor Medal, which is an award for the

(05:24):
person with the most outstanding academic standing in the graduating class.
Eighteen was a pivotal year in Allen's life. That February,
he eloped with a teacher named Nas Clark, using the
name Robert Allen Bamford, Jr. He also got his license
to practice medicine that year, and he underwent surgery as
part of a transition to a male identity. It started

(05:46):
when he sought treatment from Dr J. Allan Gilbert for
a phobia of loud noises. Right. A lot of times
when you see this referred to, it says that he
was seeking treatment because of his attraction to women, but
it was actually this phobia that drove him to seek
some psychiatric help. In therapy, Dr Gilbert traced the root
of this phobia to an experience that Alan had when

(06:08):
he was young and which he was frightened by the
sound of his stepfather's shotgun. The psychoanalysis that followed included
things like hypnotherapy and word association, and eventually, based on
Allan's responses and reactions, Dr Gilbert concluded that the problem
was related in some way to sex. He later wrote
in his case study, which was called Quote Homosexuality and

(06:31):
its Treatment, that he didn't really expect Allen to come
and see him again once he'd spelled this whole hypothesis out. Yeah,
he really thought that Alan was gonna that it was
going to be divisive and they would not have a
relationship going forward. Too ashamed by this whole revelation to
to come back to the office, but he did return
to treatment about two weeks later, and at the request

(06:52):
of Dr Gilbert, he wrote an autobiographical account detailing his
identification with the male gender, as well as his attraction
to women and a number of romantic relationships that he'd had.
Dr Gilbert later used a lot of this account in
his case study, and at the time, American society viewed
same sex attraction as deeply abnormal, something Allan had discovered

(07:14):
while he was in college, which caused him to keep
his attractions and relationships a secret. And there was not
yet an English word for what is referred to as
transgender today. In the words of doctor Gilbert, and this
was written in his words, which is why it uses
female pronouns. After long consideration, she came to the office
with her mind made up to adopt male attire in

(07:36):
conformity with her true nature and try to face life
under conditions that might make life bearable. Suicide had been
repeatedly considered as an avenue of escape from her dilemma.
Preliminary to the adoption of male attire. She came to
me with the request that I removed her uterus, with
two definite ends in view, one to relieve her of

(07:56):
the dysmenorrhea and the inconvenience of dealing with the flow
in adle at high and to to sterilize her. I
want to comment on this for a minute. One is
that this description is really common in what you'll read
in the stories of transgender people today as far as
living as the gender that they identify with is what

(08:17):
makes life bearable to them. Um. The other is this
kind of shocking to today's point of view that that
part of the purpose was to be sterilized. Um. And
this really drew from the eugenics movement, which was still
going on, and the idea that anybody who had some
kind of mental defect or inversion should be sterilized. So

(08:39):
it's kind of a double edged sword, this whole hysterectomy
that he went through. Yeah, because in some ways, while
it was achieving what he wanted and viewed himself as,
there's also the recognition that somehow that was still flawed
which is it is. It's a troubling conundrum and I

(08:59):
can't of engine how tricky that must be to like
mentally work through. So, although there had been some surgeries
to reshape ambiguous genitalia for people who had intersex conditions
or physical parts of both male and female anatomy, the
idea of a sex reassignment surgery also did not really
exist in the US at this point. It was a

(09:22):
teeny bit better known of in Europe, following experimental sex
change surgeries on animals, just a whole other slightly troubling subject.
There's a lot of slightly troubling subject and much of
science and medicine in particular involves if you're an animal person.
It's there's a lot of stuff that has happened to
animals along the way that makes the tricky uh. And

(09:45):
this being you know, kind of a heavyweight topic, there's
added layers. But even so, with these experiments happening, sex
reassignment was still in its infancy, even on sort of
the most cutting edge areas in Europe. A German doctor
named Max Marc's had published one of the first articles
about human sex reassignment surgery as a concept in nineteen sixteen,

(10:06):
after a man who had read about these experiments and
wished to change his sex to female had contacted him.
The earliest of these surgeries are mostly about the removal
of sex organs. There just wasn't a lot of plastic
or reconstructive work as a follow up to create a
new set of organs for the opposite gender. One of
the first surgeries that did include the construction of new

(10:27):
sex organs was still years away, and that involved multiple
procedures that were conducted from nine to nineteen thirty one
on a German patient named Dorshan Richter, and this happened
at the Institute for Sexual Science in Germany, which is
a research institute operated by sex researcher Magnus Hirschfield, which
was later destroyed by the Nazis. Christine Jorgensen was the

(10:49):
first person in the United States to become famous for
having sex reassignment surgery, but that wasn't until the fifties,
so all of these developments in surgery were way far
down the line from where things where when when Alan
wanted to transition decades later, So when Alan had his
uterus and ovaries removed, he became one of the first

(11:10):
people in the United States to undergo surgery for the
purpose of gender reassignment. When Alan transitioned to living as
a man, he took the name Alan L. Hart and
he opened a medical practice in Gardener, Oregon, which is
in the southwest part of the state. But before long
of former colleagues saw him and recognized him, and in
the words of Dr Gilbert Quote, then the hounding process began,

(11:33):
which our modern social organization can carry out to such
perfection and refinement against her own members. As a consequence,
Alan and his wife began to move around a lot
from this point on, just to escape the harassment and
persecution and also the job loss that would almost inevitably
happen when his gender change was discovered. First, they spent

(11:54):
some time in rural Montana, and that lasted until the
brief depression that followed the end of World War One,
and that devastated the local farm economy, and it really
took with it Alan's livelihood. So they were already struggling,
but at that point no one could afford to come
see him as a doctor, and his marriage to ANDAs
did not survive the financial and personal stream uh In

(12:16):
three she left and they legally divorced two years later.
Around this time, Alan started to really be interested in radiology.
It was still a relatively new field at this point.
X rays were discovered in but it took some years
of improvements and methods and safety before they were actually
really usable for medical purposes. And even when he got

(12:39):
into working in radiology, they were mostly being used to
kind of examine broken bones. They had not been as
much used on looking at zop tissue yet right. Alan
gradually made a name for himself through his work in
radiology and in tuberculosis detection, as we mentioned at the
top of the podcast, and he was one of the
forerunners and using X rays to diagnose tuberculosis, he broke

(13:00):
new ground and that allowed for earlier detection and treatment
of what had been called consumption up to that point,
but he would now call tuberculosis. Yeah, and this, as
we said earlier, it worked out to be really important
in controlling tuberculosis, especially a little farther down the line
once they're actually were antibiotics to treat it. Allen met
a social worker named Edna reddick In and they got

(13:21):
married the same year, and Allan and Edna continued to
move around the country, in part to escape persecution and
in part for Allen to continue his education. He eventually
got a master's degree in radiology from the University of
Pennsylvania and a master's of public health at Yale, and
he also did postgraduate work at the New York Postgraduate Hospital.

(13:43):
Among his many jobs were working with tuberculosis patients in
a sanatorium in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and another one in Rockford, Illinois,
serving as a director of radiology at Tacoma General Hospital,
delivering lectures on public health and conducting chest X ray
clinics for tubercular his control programs. He also read the
chest X rays for military recruits that were required before

(14:05):
they could join the military. And before we go on
to a completely different aspect of his working life, and
now let's go back to Allen's writing career. At one point,
while he was living in Oregon again, Alan decided to
take some writing classes and his hope was that he
would make some money as a writer when he couldn't
find work in the medical field. I think this went

(14:27):
a lot better than he even could have expected. He
became a really successful novelist, publishing four novels between nineteen
thirty five and nineteen forty two. They were called Dr Mallory,
The Undaunted, The Lives of Men, and Dr Findlay sees
it through. Most of these books featured idealistic young doctors
who were gradually discovering discrimination, greed, and unethical practices in

(14:51):
a variety of different medical settings, including family practice, research,
and hospitals, and in five he wrote this tour reviewer quote,
the ugly things that have grown up in medicine are
the result of the ugliness and falsity of society as
a whole, of our American preoccupation with success and making money,

(15:11):
of our concentration of effort on the production of things
rather than their used for a fuller human life. These
things are not the fault of the individual physician, and
neither can they be remedied by him, so long as
the American people are permeated with the spirit of I'm
going to get mine, no matter how just so long
when attitude filter into all the professions. Doctors are people

(15:32):
first and are attracted by the current ideals just as
other people are. I feel like someone could have written
us yesterday, that's exactly what I said. I mean, people
still are writing this forever trying to kind of pick
apart that what really is the crux of problems in society?
And this one has been recurrent for a while. And

(15:53):
the books also included a number of thematic ties to
Alan's own struggles with his sexual orientation and his gender,
and his constant need to move after being recognized or
to use a modern term outed by his colleagues, And
for example, in The Undaunted, he writes this description of
a gay male character. He had been driven from place

(16:14):
to place, from job to job for fifteen years because
of something he could not alter any more than he
could change the color of his eyes. Gossip, scandal, rumor
always drove him on. It did no good to live alone,
to make few acquaintances and no intimates. Sooner or later
someone always turned up to recognize him. And then there
was that wretched business of resigning by request to be

(16:35):
gone through again, and after the concoction of the plausible
story to account for the resignation, and the ordeal of
hunting another job without explaining exactly why he had left
the old one, and at the same time without lying
about it. Each time he underwent these humiliations, his self
respects seemed first to ride and then to shrink. The

(16:56):
character who this is written was named Sandy Farquhar, and
this character also goes into radiology, hoping that his sexual
orientation will be less of an issue working in a
radiology lab instead of in a hospital or other practice
with patients. I think, of all of his characters, this
is the one that people most often associate with Alan
himself and thinks, I think maybe this is a fictional

(17:18):
representation of him because it seems so closely to mirror
his own life and experiences, and that writing and you know,
likely writing very closely about his experiences seems to have
been extremely therapeutic for him. He wrote that he could
probably he would probably not have survived without it. And
he didn't just write fiction. He also wrote a book
on radiology, which was published in nineteen forty three called

(17:40):
These Mysterious Rays, a non technical discussion of the uses
of X rays and radium, chiefly in medicine. In ve
Allen and Edna moved to West Hartford, Connecticut, where they
bought a house and Allen became the director of tuberculosis
Control for the state. For the first time in his
adult life, he was able to stay in one place
for a while, and he actually held that position for

(18:01):
seventeen years, right up until the end of his life.
He started hormone treatments after World War Two, which is
when synthetic mail hormones became available on the market. It's
possible that these treatments, which would have made his masculine
features more prominent, combined with his long marriage to Edna
and the new location to give him a little bit
more privacy and security in his professional life. Alan died

(18:24):
of heart failure on July one of nineteen sixty two,
and he was seventy one at the time. He and
Edna had been married for thirty seven years. His body
was cremated, his ashes were scattered, and his journals and
papers were destroyed, as he had requested in his will.
He also requested that no monument be erected in his memory,
and he seemed to want to just sort of fade

(18:44):
away at that point. Yeah, I can imagine someone who
has been through what he went through probably did not
want his life picked apart or he was gone. Edna
lived for another twenty years, and when she died, she
left most of her estate to the Medical Research Foundation,
just part of the Oregon Health Sciences University in his
memory when she died in two It was intended to

(19:06):
go towards leukemia research. His mother had died of leukemia,
although I wasn't able to find the date when that happened.
In our recent episodes on Jane Adams, we talked about
some of the difficulties that come with speculating about a
historical figure sexual orientation when that person didn't leave a clear,
self expressed identity, and we've gotten lots of mail about
it and it's come up Um. But part of this

(19:27):
is because identifications and attitudes have changed so radically in
the last century, even down to really significant shifts in
the language used to describe people's sexuality in their identities, right,
So it does get really really tricky. It does. And
even though for both Jane Adams UM and Alan Hart
most of their personal papers were destroyed after their death,

(19:50):
because of his psychological treatment and his novels, we have
a much more personal understanding of Alan's identity than we
do of Jane's relationships. There's also been a whole lot
of scholarly debate about just how to define Alan Hart.
He underwent surgery and transitioned to a male identity before
the words transsexual or transgender even existed. The first known

(20:12):
use of transsexual was in nineteen fifty seven, and transgender
was coined in nineteen seventy nine, so that was a
few years before and after his death. Dr Gilbert's case
study is actually a little bit problematic. It was published
just two years after Alan's transition, and he gets some
points for showing a great deal of empathy and trying
to treat Allen rather than just dismissing him as sick

(20:34):
or incurable, which was really unusual at the time that
a lot of doctors would have been sort of dismissive.
Uh and sometimes even today that still happens. But although
the case study referred to Allen only as h he
didn't do very much to disguise who he was talking about.
And he co opted a lot of Alan's autobiography, which
was written for the purpose of therapy and not intended

(20:56):
to be shared with the world, and it included very
very personal thoughts and information, extremely personal and definitely was
not a piece of work that Alan was intending for
other people beyond his therapist to read. Um it was
not clear until much more recently who who h was
in Dr Gilbert's case study. Historian Jonathan Cats is the

(21:17):
person who made that connection, and in nineteen seventy six,
Cats wrote a book called Gay American History, which identified
Alan as a lesbian, claiming that he was quote clearly
a lesbian woman loving woman who illustrates only too well
one extreme to which an intelligent, aspiring lesbian in early
twentieth century America might be driven by her own and

(21:37):
her doctor's acceptance of society's condemnation of women loving women
in On the other hand, Cats referred to this designation
as a mistake, and he said that instead, but it
was much more important to think of how Alan considered
himself and his own life. So it's more there's more
recent line of thought on the part of both Cats

(21:58):
and of sort of scholars in general. Uh. Some of
it seems to be because the whole idea of transgender
was so new at that point as a as a
concept in American consciousness, Like, we didn't so much have
the idea of a person feeling themselves to be a
different gender as as then then they were born. There

(22:19):
were certainly people who felt that way, but it wasn't
something that was sort of part of the American language
and dialogue. Yeah, I would, but most people had never
even heard of it or thought of the idea. Right.
When you read accounts of people who transitioned in those
earlier years, a lot of the description that comes up
involves U the basically the idea of I didn't even

(22:40):
realize that this was a thing that people felt until
I realized that I was feeling it. Um. Also, there
are a lot of my modern scholars who feel like
this insistence earlier on in uh In texts, that that
Alan Hart was a lesbian rather than a transgender person
is actually because of transphobia in both the LGBT communities

(23:02):
and the medical community. And so if we're going by
how he defined himself after his transition, he referred to
himself as a man, and that's full stop. Yeah, when
even as a child it seemed like kind of referred
to himself as a boy. So, uh, as far as
I'm concerned, Mail at that point, yeah, I'm really glad

(23:24):
that and at the end of his life he was
able to uh settle in one place for a while
and maybe find a little more peace than he had
had earlier on. Yeah, especially um, you know, when you
consider like some of the great contributions he made to medicine,
it seems such a pity that a person that is
working so much to help others as being tortured. Yeah. Well,

(23:47):
and at the time, the work that he was doing
was really important to public health. Um. Once a treatment
became available for tuberculosis, it became hugely important to screen
people for tuberculosis so that people could be treated promptly
and we could try to cut down on the number
one the spread of the disease and number two the
mortality of the disease. So he did a really a

(24:09):
lot of work in trying to screen people on mass
for tuberculosis and and get people into treatment before they
even realized that they were sick. So he had huge
contributions to to public health in that way. Sadly, I
think all of his books are out of print. I
couldn't even find I couldn't even find Like sometimes you
can find old books that at archive dot org or somewhere,

(24:31):
and I couldn't even find them there. Um. I did
find like, uh, copies of his book on radiology that
we're being sold through used in rare booksellers for like
a hundred and forty five dollars or something. But I
couldn't find scans of that one either, so I think
those might be a neat read. I hope that you know,
as as he becomes a more prominent figure in history,

(24:54):
which has been the case over the last ten or
fifteen years, he's been a name that has come up
more often that me be someone will find there's neither
put them back into print, or if they are in
the public domain, now get them into a place where
we can read them see what they were like. Do
you also have listener mails room? Do I have a
listener postcards? So this postcard is actually a little bit old.

(25:16):
Sometimes it takes a while for postcards to get to
us for some reason. I mean, they will be postmarked
a month of the moore they show up. Um. I'm
not sure why exactly that happens, but I have a
theory that there's a part of like the Atlanta Central
post Office Hub where they just slide off the postcards
and they just sit there for a while. I thought,
maybe you're gonna say they were sitting there reading them.

(25:37):
I'm just making that up. I don't mean to disparage
the postal service in anyway. But I just postcards do
seem to take forever, so we love to get them,
but be aware that we might not see them for
a while. This one is from high and it's still
It's a dated July third, eighteen sixty three, and then
the cards crossed out says, high ladies, greetings from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

(26:01):
I'm a huge Civil War buff and flew across the
country from the l A area to be here for
the celebration of the one fiftieth anniversary of the battle.
I've been looking forward to this since i was thirteen
years old, and I'm thirty now, so it's kind of
fulfilling a half lifelong dream. I wanted to share this
with you Today. Thousands of reenactors blocked the mile of

(26:22):
pickets charge ending here at the quote high water mark,
the closest the Confederacy came to winning the battle and
subsequently the war. Today the Yankees met the ReBs with
claps and cheers instead of cannons and muskets. Was an
amazing site to behold. Thanks for your all your Civil
War podcasts. And then we get a little heart and
a peace sign and a smiley faced tie and the

(26:44):
picture on the other side is of the high Water
Market Getty furg It's very cool. I'm accidentally kidding my
microphone with postcard too, because she's sharing with the rest
of the clubs. I'm trying to show everyone the cold picture.
So I love that story. It is to really neat.
I remember when that was going on. I my Facebook
feed because I do a lot of costuming. It was

(27:06):
just filled of like people sadly bemoaning the fact that
they had not been able to make it up there
for it, so they were they were watching everyone else's
feeds that were there and watching their pictures come through.
And let me tell you how much I would rather
watch other people in costume doing that. Because July is
hot and civil war attired. If you, especially if you
are a woman person, there's some layers, many many layers.

(27:30):
I would find that to be unbearable. You would not,
you like, I don't mind being hot at all. I
mean I live in the South for a reason, and
I really like all those layers. They were pretty. You know,
you kind of get like your brain copes with it.
At that point when you reach a certain degree of
like boiling hot, you just kind of switch off. And
go somewhere else, or at least I do how this

(27:54):
might be a certain symptom of the exhaustion, So I
like to think of it more like I'm a navy feel. Okay,
we can go for that. If you would like to
write to us, you can do so. We are at
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(28:16):
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can go to our website and put the word gender
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lot more at our website, which is how stuff Works
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(28:39):
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