44 Eminent Dignitaries of Public Health | Biology

The following points highlight the forty-four eminent dignitaries of public health.

1. Alfred, Grotjahn (1911):

Published a book ‘Soziale Pathologic’, in which he advocated a systematic study of diseases with special references to social factors.

2. Baker, George (1722-1809):

Discovered the cause of ‘Devonshire colic’— deduced that acidic cider formed a toxic compound with lead used to line vats in which cider was fermented, and that this lead compound caused the colic. Baker’s methods of investigation were essentially epidemiologic, consisting of comparisons between populations and conditions of Devonshire and elsewhere, where lead-lined vats were not used.

3. Bayes, Thomas (1702-1761):

English clergyman and mathematician: Author of ‘Essay towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances’ (1763, published posthu­mously), this essay contained Bayes’ Theorem.

4. Biraud, Yves (1900-1965):

French physician and statistician. He served the League of Nations (Hygiene) later, WHO, as Director of Epidemiological and Statistical Services from 1925 to 1960. In 1960,116 founded the first Chair of Health Statistics in France, at the “Ecole de Sante Publique” in Rennes.

5. Budd, William (1811-1880):

English physician who investigated infectious diseases. He worked out the epidemiologic features of typhoid, described in his monograph on the subject, published in 1873.

6. Cornifield, Jerome (1912-1979):

Statistician who introduced many methods into epidemiology, including logistic regression analysis, the estimation of relative risk, and exposure-specific rates from case control data. He also contributed much to cancer and heart disease epidemiology and the theory of clinical trials.

7. Farr, William (1807-1883):

A medical graduate who became the first Registrar-General in the newly established General Register Office of England in 1839 and remained there for more than 40 years. In the Annual Reports, the combination of facts on death rates and vivid language drew attention to many inequalities of health and sickness experience between ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ districts in England.

His many contributions to vital statistics and epidemiology are contained in his monograph Vital Statistics (London, 1885). These include a statement of the relationship between incidence and prevalence, the concepts of person-years, retrospective and prospective approaches, observed and expected numbers of events and empirical laws about the natural history of epidemics.

8. Finlay, Carlos Albert (1833-1915):

Cuban physician, initial investigator (1888- 1891) of the role of Aedes aegypti (then known as Culex fasciatus) in the transmission of yellow fever. His experiments were unsatisfactory, but his theory was fully confirmed by the experiments of the team led by REED in which he took an active part.

9. Fracastorius, Girolamo (1482-1553):

Physician, poet, natural scientist, and a man of legends, said to have required surgery at birth to open fused lips and to have survived a lightning bolt that killed his mother while he was in her arms as an infant.

He gave the word, ‘syphilis’ to the world in his mock-heroic poem, ‘Syphilis Sive Morbus Gallicus (1530)’, which explicitly described the transmission of disease by acts of venery. In ‘De Contagione (1546)’ he described transmission of infection by direct contact, by fomites and at a distance, by which he meant droplets.

10. Frank, Johann Pleter (1745-1821):

Author of ‘System einer vollstandigen medicinischen Polizey’, which established hygiene as a systematic science and contained many suggestions based on epidemiologic obser­vations.

11. Frost, Wade Hampton (1880-1938):

American epidemiologist and teacher whose work led to epidemiology from descriptive accounts of epidemics and their investigation toward explanations of the reasons for fluctuating incidence and prevalence.

Using careful analysis of mortality and morbidity rates, he was able to demonstrate the interplay of environmental and constitutional factors in causing epidemics. His analysis of tuberculosis mortality rates by cohort or generation of birth (published posthumously) was a consciously successful demonstration.

12. Galton, Francis (1822-1911):

A founder of the modem science of human biology and the inventor of several statistical methods. Perhaps he is best-known as the author of ‘Hereditary Genius (1869)’, an analysis of physical and intellectual characteristics of successive generations of several hundred prominent families.

Observing that offspring of parents of unusual talent, height, etc., tended toward average he formulated the “Law of Filial Regression” (the origin of the term ‘regression’). His statistical approaches were refined and extended by his pupil, Karl Pearson, the founder of Modern Biometry.

13. Goldberger, Joseph (1874-1927):

Responsible for a brilliant series of investigations of pellagra. After logical deductions led him to reject the prevailing view that pellagra had an infectious origin, he conducted studies in several rural communities and in institutions leading conclusively to the demonstration that pellagra was a dietary-deficiency disease.

14. Graunt, John (1620-1674):

By profession a haberdasher, he was a member of the small community of scholars and natural scientists in London who were Fellows of the Royal Society in its early years and who made important contributions to the natural science.

Graunt studied the Bills of Mortality and used them to conduct the first analytic studies of vital statistics, identifying differences in mortality rates between the sexes, between city— and country-­folk, recording all in natural and political observations mentioned in a following index and made upon the Bills of Mortality (London, 1662).

15. Greenwood Major (1888-1949):

Greenwood was the first Professor of Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He inspired a whole generation of British epidemiologists, introducing to the subject a level of mathematical reasoning and statistical rigour it had not previously known. An author of many papers and several monographs, best known of which is Epidemics and Crowd Diseases (London 1933).

16. Hippocrates of Cos (C 460-370 Bc):

Greek physician, “Father of Medicine”, responsible for careful clinical observations of many important and common diseases—tetanus, mumps, puerperal septicemia, etc. His writings contain important epidemiologic observations, as in the book ‘Airs, Waters, Places and Epidemics.’

17. Holmes Oliver Wendell (1809-1894):

Physician, poet, philosopher, and crusader against puerperal fever. He argued that this was conveyed to patients by the contaminated hands and clothes of attending physicians and recommended washing the hands and changing clothes as a way to prevent it. Unlike Semmelweis, he succeeded in convincing the medical profession. His correct belief was recorded in a paper ‘The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever’.

N. Engl. Q.J. Med. Surg. 1: 503-530, 1842- 43.

18. Jenner, Edward (1749-1823):

An English physician and naturalist. On the basis of the observation that dairy maids who had had cow pox never got small pox, he inoculated a boy of age 10 with cow pox (vaccinia) in 1796. Over the succeeding two years he inoculated 22 more persons and then attempted to inoculate them with small pox, already without inducing this infection.

The results of his work were published in ‘An Inquiry into the Cause and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae’ (London, 1798). This successful method of immunizing persons and populations against small pox led directly to the ultimate worldwide eradication of small pox in 1977.

19. Johana, Peter Frank (1745-1821):

A liberal health philosopher of his time, conceived public health as good health laws enforced by the police and enunciated the principle that the state is responsible for the health of the people.

20. John, Snow (1854):

He had carried epidemiological investigation of cholera epidemic in Broad Street, London, and established for the first time the method of transmission of cholera.

21. KOCH, ROBERT (1843-1910):

One of the founders of microbiology and an important contributor to our understanding of infectious disease epidemiology. His major contributions to medical science include the life cycle of anthrax, the etiology of traumatic infection, methods of fixing and staining bacteria, and in 1882, the discovery of the tubercle bacillus.

The Paper reporting this contained the first statement of Koch’s postulates. In 1883, he discovered the cholera vibrio. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1905.

22. Leeuwenhoek, Antoni Van (1632-1723):

An early microscopist, the first to use his microscopes to examine and describe small creatures (animalcules) such as the protozoan organisms in vaginal secretions, spermatozoa, and—with growing ability to make more powerful microscopes—infectious microorganisms. He was, thus, a key figure in the development of the germ theory of disease.

23. Lind, James (1716-1794):

British naval surgeon; contributed to improve hygiene aboard ships, conducted what amounted to epidemiologic experiments which established that scurvy could be prevented by fresh fruits such as lemons and oranges.

24. Louis, Pierre Charles Alexander (1787- 1872):

French physician and mathematician. One of the founders of medical statistics. His research on tuberculosis, which included dissection of 358 specimens and study of 1960 clinical cases, led to publication of Recherches ‘anatomicopathologiques sur la phthisie’ (Paris, 1825). This work and others are marked by rigorous numerical precision and demonstration of similarities and differences based upon numerical distribution of data.

25. Malthus, Thomas Robert (1766-1834):

An English clergyman and natural scientist who argued in ‘An Essay on the Principles of Population’ (London, 1798), that population in­creases in geometric progression while food supplies increase only in arithmetical progression, thus making famine inevitable. His work justifies his recognition as one of the founders of demography, even though events proved his predictions wrong.

26. Manson, Patrick (1844-1922):

Studied tropical diseases in China and made many contributions of fundamental importance, notably the transmission of filariasis by culicine mosquitoes, parts of the life cycle of schistosomes. He investigated and observed many other tropical parasitic diseases and founded the London School of (Hygiene and) Tropical Medicine in 1898.

27. Maxcy, Kenneth Fuller (1889-1966):

American epidemiologist and teacher, worked out the epidemiology of endemic typhus, including the role of the rat and the rat flea in transmission.

28. Mills’ Canon (1856):

In ‘System of Logic (1856)’, J. S. Mill devised logical strategies (Canons) from which causal relationship may be inferred. Four in particular are pertinent in epidemiology: the methods of agreement, differences, residues and concomitant variation.

Method of agreement (First Canon):

“If two or more instances of the phenomenon under investigation have only one circumstances in common, the circumstance in which alone all the instances agree, is the cause (or effect) of the given phenomenon”.

Method of difference (Second Canon):

“If an instance in which the phenomenon under investigation occurs, and an instance in which it does not occur, have every circumstance in common save one, that one occurring only in the former, the circumstance in which alone the two instances differ in the effect, or cause or a necessary part of the cause, of the phenomenon”.

Method of residues (Third Canon):

“Whatever phenomenon varies in any manner whenever another phenomenon varies in some particular manner, is either a cause or an effect of that phenomenon, or is connected with it through some fact of causation”.

29. Nightingale, Florence (1820-1910):

Identified as the founder of modem nursing. In addition to her famous work of elevating nursing to a noble profession during the Crimean War (1854-55), and establishing a training school for nurses at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London, she recognised the importance of statistical analysis of hospital records (‘Notes on Hospitals’, London, Longmans 1859); her contributions were recognised by election to Fellowship of the Royal Statistical Society. Her best known work is ‘Notes on Nursing (1865)’.

30. Panum Peter Ludwig (1820-1885):

A Danish physician who observed first hand an epidemic of measles in the Faroe Islands in 1846. This was the first outbreak there for many years, and, from the epidemic pattern, Panum deduced some basic, previously unknown details about the method of spread, the incubation period, the lasting immunity that followed infection, and the relationship between age and severity of infection.

31. Pasteur, Louis (1822-1895):

One of the founders of bacteriology and, therefore, an important figure also in epidemio­logy. Starting in chemistry, he worked out the biological basis for fermentation, and then went on to make many important discoveries in bacteriology—notably vaccines against anthrax and rabies. He is, of course, eponymously honored by the word ‘pasteurization’.

32. Petty, William (1623-1687):

A member of the same circle as John Graunt, he is equally recognised as a pioneer in vital statistics and economics. His ideas and concepts of life time earning capability are contained in ‘Political Arithmetic’ (London, 1961).

33. Pickles, William Norman (1885-1969):

English general practitioner who observed and recorded outbreaks in an isolated rural community for many years. His observations and methods of recording contributed to improved understanding of infectious disease epidemiology.

34. Pott, Percival (1714-1788):

An eminent surgeon, for whom Pott’s Disease and Pott’s Fracture are named, he deserves recognition because of his epidemiologic obser­vation that cancer of the scrotum occurred only among chimney sweeps. However, there are no numbers in his brief report on this disease, the report consists only of generalized statements.

35. Quetelet, Lambert Apolphe Jacques (1796-1875):

Belgian astronomer, statistician and social scientist, one of the first to apply statistical thinking to the social and biological sciences, e.g., in delineating the (normal) distribution of variables such as height in the population. He influenced others who followed, e.g., Florence Nightingale.

36. Ramazzinl Bernarding (1633-1714):

‘Father of Occupational Medicine’, published ‘Morbis Artificum’. (On the Diseases of Workers) in 1700. Based on observation and anecdote, this was the first systematic account of diseases related to work place exposures.

37. Ross, Ronald (1857-1932):

Continued in India the work begun by Laveran and Manson on mosquitoes as vectors of infectious diseases. In a series of experiments and microscopic dissections, he concluded that only the anopheles mosquitoes carried the malaria parasite and that a developmental state of the parasite took place in the mosquito (on some peculiar pigmented cells found in two mosquitoes fed on malarial blood, Brit. Med. J. 1786-1787, 1897). Awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1902.

38. Ryle, John Anthony (1889-1950):

A specialist in internal medicine who became the first Professor of Social Medicine at Oxford in 1943. He conceived the natural history of disease as a complex interaction of endogenous, environ­mental, social, and emotional factors. Although he was not an epidemiologist, his approach contained many concepts and methods employed by clinical epidemiologists a generation later.

39. Semmelweis, Ignaz Philip (1818-1865):

Discovered the cause of puerperal fever by carefully comparing infection rates in two wards of the Allgemenes Krankenhaus in Vienna, in one of which students customarily came direct from the dissecting room to the patients’ bedside: Unhappily, his conclusions were rejected by his colleagues.

40. Smith, Theobald (1859-1934):

Microbiologist and immunologist, worked on hog cholera, parasite tick-borne cattle fever, the differentiation of human and bovine tuber­culosis, and on anaphylaxis.

41. Snow, John (1813-1858):

London general practitioner and early anesthetist (he assisted Queen Victoria’s delivery of two of her children with chloroform). His fame rests upon his observations, brilliant deductions, painstaking personal enquiries and analytic studies of cholera outbreaks in the mid-19th century in London and elsewhere.

All are recorded in the ‘Mode of Communication of Cholera which can be regarded as the first definitive working test on epidemiology and which also contained an explicit statement of the germ theory of transmission, written 30 years before Koch discovered the cholera vibrio.

42. Sydenham, Thomas (1624-1689):

A great English physician in the tradition of Hippocrates and one of the founding fathers of epidemiology (although his ideas about the meteorological causes of epidemics were wrong). His writings contain many careful and comprehensive accounts of important epidemic diseases, notably plague, malaria, measles, dysentery and scarlet fever.

His Opera Omni has been twice translated into English; the second (and better) two-volume translation by Latham was published by the Sydenham Society in 1848-1850.

43. Sydenstricker, Edgar (1881-1936):

An economist who was appointed the first public health statistician in the US Public Health Service and became a prominent epidemiologist, public health worker, and policy maker; worked with Goldberger on pellagra and conducted some of the healthy surveys and numerous epidemio­logic studies of infectious disease.

44. Takaki Kanehiro (1849-1915):

Japanese nobleman and naval surgeon who used his opportunity as director of naval medical services to conduct large scale dietary experiments on populations of naval personnel, demonstrating that beriberi could be prevented by a mixed diet containing protein as well as rice.