Medicine: Sanitarian’s Reward

While Charles-Edward Amory Winslow was a student at M.I.T. in the ’90s, one of his teachers was a man dedicated to a relatively new idea: that the health of the people is a proper concern of governments. The teacher, William T. Sedgwick, has gone down in history as the father of the public-health movement in the U.S. In Manhattan this week, Pupil Winslow won a special ($2,500) award from the Albert & Mary Lasker Foundation because he has fathered modern public-health practice, not only in the U.S., but around the world.

Public health in Winslow’s youth was largely limited to water supply and sewage disposal (both of which the Romans had been good at 2,000 years earlier), plus vaccinations against smallpox and faltering efforts to halt the spread of infectious diseases. Biologist Winslow, who lists himself as a “sanitarian,” worked in the state health departments of Massachusetts and New York, then moved on in 1915 to a full-dress professorship in public health at Yale.

For 30 years he gave graduate courses to physicians, physiologists, bacteriologists, epidemiologists, nutritionists, mental hygienists and engineers working on water supply, sewerage and housing, forever emphasizing how all these specialties met in the common purpose of protecting and improving the public health. Today, more than a thousand Winslow men are spread across the U.S., in city, county, state and national health agencies, and around the world, preaching his gospel that in the long run the price of health is far less than the cost of sickness.

Now 75, and technically retired seven years ago, Dr. Winslow has not slowed down a bit. Slight, stooped, and a nervous chain-smoker, he still edits the American Journal of Public Health, has just finished the second of five volumes on public health. Says his Yale successor, Dr. Ira Hiscock: “Winslow is still so young that young people go to him for new, young ideas.”

Other Lasker Award ($1,000) winners:

¶ Dr. Brock Chisholm of Toronto, for his work as director general of the World Health Organization.

¶ Dr. Howard A. Rusk of New York City, for rehabilitation of the disabled.

¶ Dr. Conrad A. Elvehjem, Wisconsin biochemist, for finding out the body’s needs in minerals, vitamins, amino acids.

¶ Dentists Frederick S. McKay of Colorado Springs and H. Trendley Dean of Washington, for promoting water fluoridation.

¶ Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet of Melbourne, for fundamental work on viruses.