Monthly Archives: October 2018

Looking Out for the Health of the Nation: The History of the U.S. Surgeon General

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By Judith Salerno M.D., M.S., President; and Paul Theerman, Ph.D., Director of the Library

It is widely recognized that the role of the U.S. Surgeon General is to set the national agenda for health and wellness. In describing the position, the Surgeon General’s website states that: “As the Nation’s Doctor, the Surgeon General provides Americans with the best scientific information available on how to improve their health and reduce the risk of illness and injury.”

The position, and the role of today’s U.S. Public Health Service, evolved from very modest beginnings. The story begins in 1798, during President John Adams’ term, with the passage of a law that created a fund to provide medical services for merchant seamen. The following year military seamen were included as well, with the cost of their care paid through a deduction from the seamen’s wages. Over the next 60 years, the government built hospitals in the country’s seaports and river ports.

Fast forward to the Civil War, in the course of which the Federal marine hospitals almost ceased to function. In the aftermath of the War, the Marine Hospital Service was established in 1870 to revitalize them as a national hospital system. Administration was centralized under a medical officer, the Supervising Surgeon, who was later given the title of Surgeon General. The first Supervising Surgeon, Dr. John Woodworth, set about creating a corps of medical personnel to run the Marine Hospital Service. In 1889, Congress officially recognized this new personnel system by formally authorizing the creation of the Commissioned Corps. These public health workers, all of whom initially were physicians, were organized along military lines, with the Surgeon General as their leader. The Surgeon General was given a rank equivalent to a three-star Admiral.

MarineHospital_StatenIsland

“Aerial View U.S. Marine Hospital Stapleton, Staten Island, N.Y.” From the collection of Dr. Robert Matz, New York Academy of Medicine Library.

In the decades following the Civil War, the federal government began to assume many duties and responsibilities that heretofore had been undertaken by the states. The Marine Hospital Service took over the administration of quarantines and the health inspection of immigrants. It established a bacteriological lab on Staten Island (the “Hygienic Laboratory”) to better understand infectious diseases, and it ran a hospital on Ellis Island. The Service also coordinated state health efforts and standardized and published health statistics. In 1878, it began the publication of Public Health Reports (the official journal of the U.S. Surgeon General and the U.S. Public Health Service).

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“Doctor’s Examination.” From Quarantine Sketches.

At the turn of the previous century, as part of the progressive era reforms, the Service was given responsibility for controlling the quality of newly developed vaccines. And in 1912, the Service was given a new name—the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS). Its mission was to:

“Investigate the diseases of man and conditions influencing the propagation and spread thereof, including sanitation and sewage and the pollution either directly or indirectly of the navigable streams and lakes of the United States.”

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the Public Health Service took on an increasingly important role. Its staff grappled with the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918 and, for a time, it attended to the needs of injured veterans who were returning from World War I. It also undertook research into endemic diseases. For example, a USPHS physician, Dr. Joseph McMullen, did pioneering work in controlling trachoma (an infectious eye disease) and another USPHS doctor, Joseph Goldberger, made the discovery that a dietary deficiency causes pellagra.

The Service set up hospitals for the treatment of narcotics addiction in Lexington, Kentucky, and Fort Worth, Texas. Its efforts to control malaria in the American South led to the establishment of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the move of the Hygienic Laboratory from New York to Washington was the precursor to the establishment of the National Institutes of Health. USPHS also assumed responsibility for providing medical services to Native Americans and federal prisoners and, regrettably, it also oversaw shameful medical experiments in Tuskegee, Alabama, and in Guatemala.

From the 1930s onward, the role of the Surgeon General became more and more public. In 1964, Surgeon General Dr. Luther Terry took the campaign against tobacco use to the American public with the publication of Smoking and Health. This led in due course to major changes in the way cigarettes were advertised and eventually to tobacco regulation.

Prior to 1968, the Surgeon General was the head of the USPHS and all administrative, program, and financial responsibilities ran through this office, with the Surgeon General directly reporting to the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW). Following a departmental reorganization that year, the USPHS’s responsibilities were delegated to HEW’s Assistant Secretary for Health (ASH) and the Surgeon General became a principal deputy and advisor to the ASH. In 1987, the Office of the Surgeon General was reestablished and the Surgeon General again became responsible for managing the Commissioned Corps.

Over the past 40 years, the Surgeon General has increasingly become the public face of health for the country. In the 1980s, Dr. C. Everett Koop made information about AIDS available to every American—in the form of an unprecedented direct mail campaign—as he sought to frame the disease as a public health threat demanding public health measures. In recent years, the Surgeons General have sought to publicize and address disparities in health care and outcomes among the nation’s increasingly diverse population. As the Commissioned Corps itself has become more diverse, so too have those holding the position of Surgeon General, with the appointment of the first female, African American, and Hispanic Surgeons General.

Drs. Elders, Satcher, Novello, and Carmona viewing our 1933 book of school children’s signatures thanking NYC Commissioner of Health for diphtheria immunizations on display in Germ City.
The Surgeons General’s signatures in our Drs. Barry and Bobbi Coller Rare Book Reading Room 2018 visitor’s book.

The New York Academy of Medicine was honored to host four illustrious former U.S. Surgeons General, Drs. Joycelyn Elders, David Satcher, Antonia Novello, and Richard Carmona, in conversation with Dr. Freda Lewis-Hall on October 15. They shared their reflections on what it takes to ensure the health of the nation. Above they are exploring with Curator Anne Garner our current exhibition on public health, “Germ City: Microbes and the Metropolis,” co-curated with the Museum of the City of New York, on view through April 2019.

References:
Parascandola, John. “Public Health Service,” in A Historical Guide to the U.S. Government, ed. George Thomas Kurian (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 487–93.
Quarantine sketches : glimpses of America’s threshold. New York: Maltine Co., 1903.
 “The Reports of the Surgeon General,” Profiles in Science, https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/NN/, accessed September 14, 2018.

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The First Yellow Fever Pandemic: Slavery and Its Consequences

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Today’s guest post is by Billy G. Smith, Distinguished Professor in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at Montana State University. He earned his PhD at University of California Los Angeles. His research interests include disease; race, class and slavery; early America, and mapping early America.

Bird flu, SARS, Marburg, Ebola, HIV, West Nile Fever.  One of these diseases, or another, that spread from animals and mosquitoes to humans may soon kill most people on the planet.  More likely, the great majority of us will survive such a world-wide pandemic, and even now we have a heightened awareness that another one may be on the horizon.  This blog focuses on these issues in the past, outlining a virtually unknown voyage of death and disease that transformed the communities and nations bordering the Atlantic Ocean (what historians now refer to as the Atlantic World).  It traces the journey of a sailing ship that inadvertently instigated an epidemiological tragedy, thereby transforming North America, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean islands.  This ship helped to create the first yellow fever pandemic.

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The Hankey. From “Ship of Death: The Voyage that Changed the Atlantic World.”

In 1792, the Hankey and two other ships carried nearly three hundred idealistic antislavery British radicals to Bolama, an island off the coast of West Africa, where they hoped to establish a colony designed to undermine the Atlantic slave trade by hiring rather than enslaving Africans.  Poor planning and tropical diseases, especially a particularly virulent strain of yellow fever likely contracted from the island’s numerous monkeys (through a mosquito vector), decimated the colonists and turned the enterprise into a tragic farce.

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 From “Ship of Death: The Voyage that Changed the Atlantic World.”

In early 1793, after most colonists had died and survivors had met resistance from the indigenous Bijagos for invading their lands, the Hankey attempted to return to Britain.  Disease-ridden, lacking healthy sailors, and fearing interception by hostile French ships, the colonists caught the trade winds to Grenada.  They and the mosquitoes in the water barrels spread yellow fever in that port and, very soon, throughout the West Indies.  This was only a few months before the British arrived to quell the slave rebellion in St. Domingue (now Haiti).  The British and subsequently the French military had their troops decimated by the disease—one reason why the slave revolution succeeded.  The crushing defeat in the Caribbean helped convince Napoleon to sell the vast Louisiana territory to the United States.  He turned eastward to expand his empire, altering the future of Europe and the Americas.

“A Melancholy Scene.” From The Public Response to the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic.
“Mortality List.” From Ship of Death: The Voyage that Changed the Atlantic World.

A few months after the Hankey arrived in the West Indies, commercial and refugee ships carried passengers and mosquitoes infected with yellow fever to Philadelphia, the nation’s capital during the 1790s.  The resulting epidemic killed five thousand people and forced tens of thousands of residents, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other prominent federal government leaders, to flee for their lives.  The state, city, and federal government all collapsed, leaving it to individual citizens to save the nation’s capital.  Meanwhile, doctors fiercely debated whether “Bulama fever” (as many called it) was a “new” disease or a more virulent strain of yellow fever common in the West Indies.  Physicians like the noted Benjamin Rush fiercely debated the causes of and treatment for the disease.  They mostly bled and purged their patients, at times causing more harm than good because of the rudimentary state of medicine.

Absalom Jones
Anne Saville, artist Adrienne Mayor’s rendition
Richard Allen

Among those who stepped forward to aid people and save the city were members of the newly emerging community of free African Americans. Led by Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, and Anne Saville, black Philadelphians volunteered to nurse the sick and bury the dead—both dangerous undertakings at the time.  Many African Americans and physicians, exposed to yellow-fever infected mosquitoes, made the ultimate sacrifice as both groups died in disproportionately high numbers.  When a newspaper editor subsequently maligned black people for their efforts, Jones and Allen wrote a vigorous response—among the first publications by African Americans in the new nation.

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For one of the first times in American history, blacks responded in print; Revd.s Allen and Jones published a pamphlet answering the charges; Courtesy of the Internet Archive.

During the ensuing decade, yellow fever went global, afflicting every port city in the new nation on an annual basis.  Epidemics also occurred in metropolitan areas throughout the Atlantic World, including North and South America, the Caribbean, southern Europe, and Africa.  Among other consequences, this disaster encouraged Americans to fear cities as hubs of death.  The future of the United States, as Thomas Jefferson argued, would be rural areas populated by yeomen farmers rather than the people in teeming metropolises.  The epidemics also helped solidify the decision of leaders of the new nation to move its capital to Washington D.C. and away from the high mortality associated with Philadelphia.

After the Hankey finally limped home to Britain, its crew was taken into service in the Royal Navy; few of them survived long.  More importantly, the image of Africa as the “white man’s graveyard” became even more established in Britain and France, thereby providing a partially protective barrier for Africa from European invasion until the advent of tropical medicine.  The “Bulama fever” plagued the Atlantic World for the next half century, appearing in epidemic form from Spain to Africa to North and South America.  The origins and treatment of the disease drew intense debates as medical treatment became highly politicized, and the incorrect idea that Africans enjoyed immunity to yellow fever became an important part of the scientific justification of racism in the early nineteenth century.

Join Billy Smith along with epidemiologist Michael Levy on October 24 for Sickness and the City for a conversation that uses both science and history to understand the intersection of urban development and the spread of contagions.

References
Billy G. Smith. Ship of Death: The Voyage that Changed the Atlantic World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.

Dr. David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Early Republic

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Today’s guest post is written by Victoria Johnson, author of  American Eden (Liveright, 2018). On October 9, Dr. Johnson will give a talk at the Academy on David Hosack (1769–1835), the visionary doctor who served as the attending physician at the Hamilton-Burr duel in 1804. Hosack founded or co-founded many medical institutions in New York City, among them nation’s first public botanical garden. The following is adapted from American Eden, which is on the longlist of ten works nominated for the National Book Award in Nonfiction for 2018.

David Hosack’s twin passions were medicine and nature. As a young medical student he risked his life to defend the controversial practice of corpse dissection because he knew it was the best chance doctors had to understand the diseases that killed Americans in droves every year. He studied with the great Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush and went on to become a celebrated medical professor in his own right. He drew crowds of students who hung on his every word and even wrote down his jokes in their notebooks. He performed surgeries never before documented on American soil and advocated smallpox vaccination at a time when many people were terrified of the idea. He pioneered the use of the stethoscope in the United States shortly after its invention in France in 1816. He published one innovative medical study after another—on breast cancer, anthrax, tetanus, obstetrics, the care of surgical wounds, and dozens of other subjects. In the early twentieth century, a medical journal paid tribute to Hosack’s many contributions by noting that “there is perhaps no one person in the nineteenth century to whom New York medicine is more deeply or widely indebted than to this learned, faithful, generous, liberal man.”[i]

Andrew Marshal anatomy course

David Hosack’s admission card to Andrew Marshal’s anatomy course in London, 1793/94. Courtesy of Archives and Special Collections, Columbia University Health Sciences Library.

Yet although Hosack found surgery vital and exciting, he was certain that saving lives also depended on knowing the natural world outside the human body. As a young man, he studied medicine and botany in Great Britain, and he returned to the United States convinced that it was at their intersection that Americans would find the most promising new treatments for the diseases that regularly swept the country. Hosack talked and wrote constantly about the natural riches that blanketed the North American continent. The health of the young nation, he argued, would depend on the health of its citizens, and thus on the skill of its doctors in using plants to prevent and treat illness.

In 1801, Hosack bought twenty acres of Manhattan farmland and founded the first public botanical garden in the young nation. He collected thousands of specimens and used them to teach his Columbia students and to supervise some of the nation’s earliest pharmaceutical research.

painting of David Hosack

David Hosack with his botanical garden in the distance. Engraving by Charles Heath, 1816, after oil paintings by Thomas Sully and John Trumbull, Collections of the National Library of Medicine.

Because of his garden, Hosack became one of the most famous Americans of his time. His medical research there cemented his reputation as the most innovative doctor in New York. When Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr needed an attending physician for their 1804 duel, they both chose David Hosack. Thomas Jefferson, Alexander von Humboldt, and Sir Joseph Banks sent Hosack plants and seeds for his garden and lavished praise on him. In 1816, he was elected to the Royal Society of London, an extraordinary honor for an American.

Today, though, few people know Hosack’s name, and his botanical garden grows skyscrapers year-round. It’s now Rockefeller Center.

Learn more about this luminary individual; join us for Losing Hamilton, Saving New York: Dr. David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Early Republic at the Academy on Tuesday October 9th at 6pm.

References:
[i] Dr. David Hosack and His Botanical Garden,” Medical News 85, no. 11 (1904): 517-19 [no author], p. 517.