Columbia University

Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health

David Rosner, Director
Ronald Bayer, Associate Director for Public Health Ethics
Amy Fairchild, Assistant Director for Academic and Scholarly Activities

It is with great pleasure that we announce that Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health has established a Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health. It is the first such Center established in a School of Public Health and seeks to bring together academic historians, public health practitioners, and educators in a unique effort to establish history as an integral part of all health policy and public health analyses. While primarily an academic study center, the mission of the Center is to create a place where scholars and practitioners can meet in an effort to bring a level of historical sophistication to policy and research efforts in public health.

The Center is primarily focused on modern historical investigations into issues that shape contemporary health practice. The Center, located in the School's Division of Sociomedical Sciences, is composed of a diverse faculty of historians and ethicists drawn from the School of Public Health, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and the Department of History. Even in its nascent state, it is, collectively, among the most distinguished faculties in the nation. Professor David Rosner is the Director of the Center and Professor Ronald Bayer is Associate Director for the Ethics of Public Health. Amy Fairchild, Assistant Professor of Sociomedical Sciences, is the Assistant Director for Academic and Scholarly Activities. Associated Faculty, drawn from the three units of Columbia, include: Elizabeth Blackmar; Paul Edelson; Barron Lerner; Gerald Markowitz; Gerald Oppenheimer; David Rothman, Sheila Rothman; Nancy Stepan; and Marcia Wright.

The Center will be actively involved in both research and training. Presently, the Associates of the Center are all participants in the Program in the History and Ethics of Public Health and Medicine, which trains MPH and PhD students in collaboration with the History Department and the Medical School's Center for the Study of Society and Medicine. Each of the faculty is deeply involved in both contemporary policy as well as historical inquiries. Among the major efforts presently underway at the Center are studies of occupational and environmental disease, including childhood lead poisoning and the history of plastics and their relationship to contemporary debate around health policy and litigation; immigration history; public health and the built environment; AIDS as a social and historical issue; the history and ethics of public health surveillance, illness narratives as a means of gauging social, cultural, and technological change; tobacco policy; and substance abuse.

The Center has a major web site development project funded by the NSF and developed by Amy Fairchild with the assistance of Elizabeth Robillotti and Martina Lynch. Located at www.livingcity.hs.columbia.edu, the site presently provides a vast array of primary visual and documentary information about the changing health status of New Yorkers between 1865 and 1920. Using materials from the New York Department of Health, the newspapers and magazines of the time, and even movies made in the early 1900, visitors can gain an intimate insight into the changing nature of epidemic disease, the environment in which these diseases developed, and popular imagery and discussions of the meaning of disease in the lives of New Yorkers 100 years ago.

Presently, plans are being made in conjunction with demographers and geographers at CIESIN to expand the site dramatically by integrating a geographic information system (GIS) that will allow visitors to see the evolving infrastructure of water, sewerage, electrical, and transportation systems, all of which affected the demographic distribution, crowding, and health of New Yorkers. The Center is also working with The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning to use The Living City to engage students with primary sources and as the basis for a distance education initiative. We believe that this effort at organizing a history of public health presence on the Health Sciences campus will have the effect of spurring the University as a whole to develop a real presence nationwide in the History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health. Columbia is uniquely situated to become a national leader, producing an unparalleled body of scholarly work and a superb group of students who will soon make their mark felt throughout the nation.