She applied to Harvard Medical School, which did not admit women at that time. Consequently, she enrolled at Bryn Mawr for a year of study, where she met Ethel Collins Dunham. Both went on to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and the two became life partners. Eliot met extraordinary success in her career in medicine. She was appointed director of the Children’s Bureau’s, Division of Child and Maternal Health in 1924 and simultaneously collaborated with Edwards A. Park of Yale Medical School in developing a protocol for preventing rickets, a debilitating bone condition in children. Eliot was named the president of the American Public Health Association, the first woman to be elected to the post. In 1958, she was awarded the Association’s Sedgewick Memorial Medal, also a first for a woman. She also served as chair of the Harvard School of Public Health’s department of child and maternal health. Among her many additional honors were the Howland Medal given by the American Pediatric Society and the creation of the Martha May Eliot Award by the American Public Health Association, which is given to individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the fields of child and maternal health care.
