Jane Hinton (May 1, 1919 – April 9, 2003) was a pioneer in the study of bacterial antibiotic resistance and one of the first two African-American women to gain the degree of Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (1949). Prior to her veterinary medicine studies at the University of Pennsylvania, she had been a laboratory technician at Harvard, codeveloping Mueller–Hinton agar, a culture medium that is now commonly used to test bacterial susceptibility to antibiotics. She later practiced as a small animal veterinarian in Massachusetts, and then as a federal government inspector investigating disease outbreak in livestock for the Department of Agriculture.
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Early life and education
Jane Hinton was born on May 1, 1919. Her father, William Augustus Hinton (1883–1959), was a bacteriologist and pathologist who was an expert in the diagnosis and treatment of syphilis, including the development of tests for syphilis. The son of former slaves, he was the first African-American professor at Harvard University and the first African-American author of a textbook. He entered laboratory medicine because racism in Boston prevented him from gaining an internship in medicine. Jane Hinton's mother was Ada Hawes (1878–1958), a Latin and English teacher at Tallahassee State College and social worker, born in Georgia. William and Ada married in 1909, and had two daughters, Jane and Ann Hinton Jones. As a child, Jane attended school in Europe, where her parents believed she would have the best education available as a black student. She returned to the United States to complete high school at Montpelier Seminary in Vermont in 1935, before earning her undergraduate degree at the age of 20 from Simmons College in 1939.