06/22/2026
Next in our features for Pride Month is Alan Hart!
Robert Allen Bamford Jr., born in Kansas in October 1890, was an American physician, radiologist, tuberculosis researcher, writer, and novelist.
Hart attended Albany College (now Lewis & Clark College) and graduated in 1912. In 1917, he obtained a Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Oregon Medical Department in Portland (now Oregon Health & Science University).
Hart devoted much of his career to research into and treatment of tuberculosis. In the early 20th century the disease was the biggest killer in America. Doctors, including Hart, were realizing that myriad illnesses (consumption, phthisis, phthisis pulmonalis, Koch's disease, scrofula, lupus vulgaris, white plague, King's evil, Pott's disease and Gibbus) were all cases of tuberculosis (TB). TB usually attacked victims' lungs first; Hart was among the first physicians to document how it then spread, via the circulatory system. Hart established numerous mass X-ray clinics (New Mexico, Illinois, Washington, and Idaho) to identify non-symptomatic TB cases in cities across the country. By the time antibiotics were introduced in the 1940s, doctors using the techniques Hart developed had managed to cut the tuberculosis death toll down to one fiftieth of what it had previously been.
For the last 16 years of his life, he headed mass X-ray programs that screened for tuberculosis in Connecticut. X-rays were not regularly used to screen for tuberculosis prior to Hart's innovation, and are still used today, which has led researchers to believe that he saved countless lives.
