Dr. Alberta Lucille Hart
(Dr. Alan Lugll Hart)
(1890 - 1962) U.S.A.
 
Physician
[In this account, the pronoun "she" will be used in Hart's early life and the pronoun "he" will be used after Hart assumed the name and professional life of a man.]
Hart grew up in Albany, Oregon as Lucille Hart and attended Albany College (now Lewis & Clark College) and Stanford University. She graduated from Albany College in 1912, and in 1917 obtained a Doctor of Medicine Degree from University of Oregon Medical Department in Portland (now Oregon Health Sciences University School of Medicine).
She was the only woman in the class and took top academic honors. She worked at a Red Cross hospital in Philadelphia for a short period following graduation.
Hart married Inez Stark in California in February, 1918, using the name Robert Allen Bamford, Jr. She assumed the identity and clothes of a man, renamed herself Alan L. Hart, and began medical practice in Southwest Oregon at the Gardiner Hospital. There, she was recognized by a former associate, and the hounding process began.
After medical school she changed her gender identity and name to Dr. Alan Ludll Hart. He soon enjoyed a social and professional freedom denied to most women at the time. Working under this identity, Hart specialized in radiology and wrote a popular book on X- ray therapy. He married a woman in 1925, practiced both diagnostic and therapeutic radiology for many years.
The challenges of Hart's passing as a man in the medical profession and literary circles for four decades involved a complicated life of deception and discrimination and led to numerous moves, job changes and financial challenges. Hart's practice in Gardiner lasted less than six months. In 1919 and 1920 he practiced in rural Southern Montana until the crash of the autumn of 1920 wiped out most of the Montana farmers and stockmen.
When he could get work, Hart spent the remaining years of his medical career in public health positions, primarily working in radiology. He held positions in tuberculosis sanitariums and x-ray clinics in New Mexico, Illinois, Washington (Spokane, Tacoma and Seattle), and Idaho. He obtained a Masters degree in radiology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1930 and a Masters degree in public health from Yale in 1948.
Hart was a prominent figure in the tuberculosis field, and for the last 16 years of his life he headed mass x-ray programs in Connecticut for the State Health Department. He wrote one book and numerous articles in his professional field.
Inez Stark left Hart in 1923, and they were divorced in 1925. Later that year he married Edna Ruddick, a school teacher who became a social worker and administrator. During the Depression in the 1930s, Alan and Edna Hart lived in Seattle where Alan had difficulties getting full-time work.
He also wrote four novels with Northwest settings, published from 1935 to 1942, which constitute a significant body of social fiction and expose greed and prejudice in the medical profession.
Hart's novels received a fair amount of critical attention and were reviewed in The New York Times, The New York Herald-Tribune, Saturday Review of Literature and other leading publications of the times. Although Hart was one of the few pre-World War II writers in the Pacific Northwest who wrote novels dealing with social issues, he has been overlooked in studies of the region's literature.
Alan and Edna Hart moved to Connecticut in 1946 and purchased a home in West Hartford in 1950. They were active in the community and in the Unitarian Church, and lived together until Alan died of heart disease on July 1, 1962. In accordance with Alan's will, his body was cremated.
The ashes were shipped to Port Angeles, Washington for scattering. The will also provided that no memorial be erected or created, and he instructed his attorney to destroy certain letters and photographs contained in a bank safety deposit box and in a locked box in his home.
Excerpts from a text by Brian Booth © 2000
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