Dr. Alice Evans: The Woman Who Saved the Milk

Alice Evans was born in eighteen eighty-one in Neath, Pennsylvania, and educated at the Susquehanna Collegiate Institute near this spot. She went on to become a bacteriologist for the United States Department of Agriculture, working in an era when women were rarely taken seriously in science. In nineteen eighteen she published a report linking brucellosis bacteria in raw milk to undulant fever in humans, a finding that had enormous implications for public health.

The response from the dairy industry and many male colleagues was dismissal and hostility. Evans persisted for more than a decade, advocating for safer milk until pasteurization gradually became standard practice. By then her findings had been confirmed by other researchers, though the recognition came slowly.

She received numerous honors before her death in nineteen seventy-five, and today pasteurized milk is so universal that most people never think about the scientist who made it the law.