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Early Life
Jane Hinton was born on May 1, 1919, in Canton, Massachusetts, to Ada (Hawes) Hinton and William Augustus Hinton. Her mother was a former teacher and her father was one of the most prominent African-American medical researchers and bacteriologists of his time. To ensure their daughter had the best education available to black students, they sent her, along with her sister, Anna, to schools in several countries within Europe.
She graduated in 1935, from the high school at Montpelier Seminary in Vermont, then enrolled at Simmons College in Boston from where she earned a bachelor's degree in 1939.
Career
After her graduation in Boston, she worked in her father's laboratory as an assistant to John Howard Mueller in Harvard University's Department of Bacteriology and Immunology. There, she helped with co-developing the Mueller-Hinton agar, which is a culture medium in which bacteria can thrive. Soon it became one of the most used methods to test bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
After World War II, Hinton decided to become a veterinarian and graduated with her Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree in 1949, from the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. In the same year, Alfreda Johnson Webb from the Tuskegee Institute, earned the same degree. Her and Jane Hinton then became the first African-American women who earned the title of Doctor of Veterinary Medicine. These two were also the first African-American members who joined the Women's Veterinary Medicine Association.
After qualifying as veterinarian, Jane worked as a small animal vet back in Canton, Massachusetts until 1955. The same year, she also joined the Department of Agriculture as a federal government inspector in Framingham, Massachusetts and was involved in research and response to outbreaks of disease in livestock.
She retired early in 1960 at the age of 41 and spent the rest of her life caring for her garden and a huge variety of pets at her home.
Jane Hinton never married and died on April 9, 2003, at the age of 83.
