Background

Charles-Edward A. Winslow was born on February 4, 1877, in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Erving Winslow, a merchant and publicist, and Catherine Mary Reignolds, an English actress, who played Shakespearean heroines and popularized Ibsen's plays in America. Early displaying a brilliance and creativity, he learned German, French, and rhetoric from his mother.

Education

After graduating from the English High School in Boston in 1894, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While an undergraduate he translated Heimath by Hermann Sudermann, a play that was a particular favorite of his mother's. It was published in 1896 as Magda.

He received his B. S. in 1898, and spent another year as a graduate student, making a notable investigation of the action of freezing on the typhoid bacillus and the importance of ice as a vehicle for disease. This served as his M. S. essay (1899), and was published in 1902 in the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Career

Winslow was appointed an assistant in William Thompson Sedgwick's department (1900 - 1901) and then served as an instructor in sanitary bacteriology from 1902 to 1905. In 1904 he wrote, with Samuel C. Prescott, The Elements of Water Bacteriology, a pioneering text. His own Elements of Applied Microscopy appeared in 1905. He was appointed assistant professor of sanitary biology (1905 - 1910) at MIT, where he was also biologist in charge of the sanitary research laboratory (1903 - 1910). In 1903 Winslow became head of MIT's sewage experiment station. He was associated with the station for seven years and prepared a number of special studies, including an investigation on the purification of Boston's sewage. He also carried through an extensive study on the Coccaceae, in which his assistant was a student named Anne Fuller Rogers.

Winslow's reputation soon became widespread. Encouraged by Sedgwick, he spent a sabbatical at the University of Chicago as a visiting assistant professor of bacteriology (1910). Shortly thereafter, he accepted an appointment as associate professor of biology at the College of the City of New York (1910 - 1914). Although he published over fifty journal articles during his four years at CCNY, Winslow seemed to prefer the challenging work as a curator of public health at the American Museum of Natural History, a position he held concurrently. As curator, he prepared imaginative public health exhibits and arranged for public lectures and seminars. The first exhibition of the Hall of Public Health in 1913 contained models of a giant house fly and other insects involved in the dissemination of disease. Winslow served as curator from 1910 to 1922.

In 1915 he left CCNY to become director of the division of publicity and health education in the New York State Department of Public Health. There he worked under Hermann M. Biggs, the new commissioner of public health. Like Sedgwick, Biggs aroused in Winslow a fierce dedication and loyalty. He became Biggs' confidant and, thirteen years later, his biographer. Under Biggs, Winslow developed innovative health promotion exhibitions and programs, edited Health News and Health Hints, and helped to coin the department's motto ("Public Health Is Purchasable. Within Natural Limitations a Community Can Determine Its Own Death Rates"). The New York experience, as teacher, curator, consultant, and public servant, was a happy one for Winslow.

But in 1915 he accepted an appointment as the first Anna M. R. Lauder Professor of Public Health at the Yale University Medical School. This was the first public health department that was an integral unit in a medical school. When Winslow accepted the Lauder chair, there was a shortage of health officers who had been trained both as doctors and as public health professionals. He attempted to imbue medical students with the "preventive" spirit. He established a program in which nonmedical bacteriologists, engineers, and social workers were trained for positions as public health scientists and administrators. He also designed a program in which medical students could obtain a combined M. D. - D. P. H. degree in five years; but whereas he was increasingly successful in training professional public health workers, who then staffed the nascent municipal and state health department, not a single Yale medical student enrolled for the joint degree. Winslow's research in this period considered the bacteriological, epidemiological, and statistical effect of various factors on the incidence of communicable diseases and problems of industrial hygiene, particularly those related to ventilation and dust hazards.

In 1916 he became the first editor of the Journal of Bacteriology, the official organ of the Society of American Bacteriologists. Winslow recognized the need for his department to serve as the catalyst for reform, and his health surveys and reports led to substantial improvement in the organization of public health services throughout Connecticut.

In 1917 Winslow was named chairman of the New York State Commission on Ventilation, serving in this capacity from 1917 to 1923 and 1926 to 1931. In 1932 he became director of the John B. Pierce Laboratory of Hygiene in New Haven, which promoted research in the field of heating, ventilation, and sanitation. Winslow and his team designed a number of experiments on the physiological effects of various atmospheric conditions and on the partition of heat loss from the human body. In a related area, he championed adequate housing and shelter.

In 1938 he became chairman of the New Haven Housing Authority, and he published scores of technical papers and reports, including one that considered the proper height of kitchen sinks. A housewife with a sore back, he reasoned, was just as much a public health concern as the sanitary removal of sewage.

In 1920 he was appointed the first chairman of APHA's Committee on Municipal Health Department Practice, a position he held for fifteen years. The committee (which in 1925 became the Committee on Administrative Practice) collected important data concerning actual health department administrative practices and prepared an appraisal form from which actual health services in a given community could be measured objectively. He saw more clearly than most others that public health was mutable and continuously expanding.

In 1926, the economics of medical care became another of Winslow's interests. He helped organize the Committee on the Costs of Medical Care. He became chairman of the executive board and was the guiding force behind its twenty-seven major surveys. He helped to draft its final report, Medical Care for the American People (1932), which called for the development of group practice and group payment of health care and for the expansion and coordination of public health and medical services. He was perplexed with the reception of the report by the American Medical Association (AMA), which responded to it with disdain, bombast, and then indifference. Gradually, the federal government assumed national leadership for both communitywide and personal health services. At the National Health Conference in 1938, Winslow spoke in support of "a coordinated, completely interlocking, dovetailing health program. " The AMA, however, would have nothing to do with a federal program. As a result of the conference and the continued intransigence of the medical profession, Winslow advocated action by the federal government. He also advocated medical care programs within the APHA, and supported national health insurance.

In 1944 Winslow became editor of the American Journal of Public Health. By the time failing eyesight forced his retirement from the journal in 1954, he had written a prodigious number of brilliant editorial essays, each a gem of erudition and clear thinking. Winslow was also deeply involved with international health.

Winslow produced numerous journal articles and monographs on historical medical topics, including "The Epidemiology of Noah Webster" (1934), The Conquest of Epidemic Disease (1943), and Man and Epidemics (1952). His other books were Healthy Living (1917); A Pioneer of Public Health - William Thompson Sedgwick (1924), with E. O. Jordan and G. C. Whipple; The Life of Hermann M. Biggs (1929); Health on the Farm and in the Village (1931); A City Set on a Hill (1934); and Health Under the "El" (1937), with Savel Zimand.

Charles-Edward Amory Winslow died on January 8, 1957, in New Haven, Connecticut.

Achievements

• Charles-Edward Amory Winslow was a seminal figure in public health, not only in his own country, the United States, but in the wider Western world. His writings (numbering more than 600 titles), lectures, and penetrating participation in councils throughout the world have been reflected in great achievements in public health and have assured his position as the predominate figure of the public health campaign in this century. The CEA Winslow Award is named after him.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Industrial Hygiene (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Industrial Hygiene The United States Steel ...)

  • Report on the Sewage Disposal Problem of New Haven (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Report on the Sewage Disposal Problem of New...)

  • The Untilled Fields of Public Health (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The Untilled Fields of Public Health Accord...)

  • Magda: A Play in Four Acts

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • The Systematic Relationships of the Coccaceœ

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Sewage Disposal

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Healthy Living: How Children Can Grow Strong for Their Country's Service

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Insects And Disease: A Statement Of The More Important Facts With Special Reference To Everyday Experience

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Handbook of Health in war and Peace; a Manual of Personal Preparedness

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Elements of Applied Microscopy. A Text-Book for Beginners. First Edition. First Thousand

    (Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part...)

  • Healthy Living. Book One. How Children Can Grow Strong for Their Country's Service

    (Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part...)

  • Protection Of River And Harbor Waters From Municipal Wastes: With Special Reference To The Conditions In New York...

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • School Ventilation, Principles and Practices

    (Additional Authors Are Frederick S. Lee, George T. Palmer...)

Views

Quotations: "There can be no doubt that the development of a practical method of water disinfection during the last two years marks an epoch in the art of water purification. "

Membership

Charles-Edward Winslow was elected to the American Public Health Association in 1902, and was involved with its programs and policies. In 1917 he was a member of an American Red Cross mission to Russia.

After the creation of a State Department of Public Health in 1917, Winslow was the first member appointed to the Board of Health. He later was a member of the league's committee on the hygiene of housing.

Personality

An energetic man, Charles-Edward Winslow walked two miles to and from work daily. While on nature walks over the summer, he would pack a lunch in a rucksack, stuff a book in a pocket, and hunt up plant specimens and insects.

Interests

• Charles-Edward A. Winslow also collected rare books, usually those with historical, medical, or public health titles.

Connections

On May 19, 1907, Charles-Edward A. Winslow married Anne Fuller Rogers. The couple had one daughter.

Father:

Erving Winslow

Mother:

Catherine Mary Winslow (Reignolds)

Wife:

Anne Fuller Winslow (Rogers)

colleague:

Hermann Michael Biggs

Hermann Michael Biggs was an American physician and pioneer in the field of public health.

colleague:

William Thompson Sedgwick

William Thompson Sedgwick was an American teacher, epidemiologist and bacteriologist.