William Augustus Hinton

In 1934, the U.S. Public Health Service adopted a syphilis blood test developed by William Augustus Hinton. The test was simple, quick and unambiguous, and at a time when syphilis was widespread and blood testing was the main tool for controlling it, a reliable diagnostic mattered on a national scale.

Hinton had come to laboratory medicine through a barred door. Born in Chicago on December 15, 1883, and raised in Kansas, he studied at the University of Kansas, earned his bachelor's degree in 1905 and taught at historically Black colleges before entering Harvard Medical School, where he graduated with honors in 1912. He had trained to become a surgeon, but racial discrimination closed that path after graduation, so he turned to the laboratory.

In 1915, the Wassermann Laboratory moved from Harvard Medical School to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and Hinton became its chief, a position he held for 38 years. The laboratory handled the diagnostic testing for syphilis across a state public-health system. In 1927, he developed a flocculation test for the disease, and the serological test that followed became a standard for years. His book, Syphilis and Its Treatment, appeared in 1936.

Teaching filled the other half of his career. He began teaching at Harvard Medical School in 1918 as an instructor in preventive medicine and hygiene, and he also taught at Simmons College, all while continuing to lead the state laboratory. He established a laboratory-technician training school for women, opening a route into medical work at a time when few such paths existed for women in the field.

In 1949, after more than three decades on the Harvard faculty, he was named Clinical Professor of Bacteriology and Immunology, becoming the first African American to hold a professorship at Harvard University. He died in 1959.

Harvard Medical School later named one of its academic societies the Hinton Society. The name marks the career of a physician the profession had first shut out of surgery and then made, through the state's public-health laboratory, one of the country's leading authorities on the diagnosis of syphilis.

He also developed a less painful method of detecting the disease.