(Originally published in 1912. This volume from the Cornel...)
Originally published in 1912. This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies. All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume.
(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
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Alphabetical Index of the Births, Marriages and Deaths, Recorded in Providence ..
(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. This text refers to the Bibliobazaar edition.
(This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before ...)
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Charles Value Chapin was an American public health officer and epidemiologist. He made distinctive contributions to this achievement, both in theory and in methodology. Chapin's ideas formed much of the scientific underpinning of the "new public health. "
Background
Charles Value Chapinwas born on January 17, 1856 in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. His father, Joshua Bicknell Chapin, who came from an old New England family, was successively a physician, druggist, photographer, and state Commissioner of Education. His mother, Jane Catherine Louise (Value) Chapin, daughter of a refugee from the French Revolution, painted portraits and occasionally taught painting to supplement the family income. Charles was the second of their three children and the only son.
Education
He attended the Mowry and Goff School in Providence and Brown University, where he graduated, B. A. , in 1876. Chapin was introduced to medicine by preceptors: his father and Dr. George D. Wilcox, a Providence homeopath. His medical training continued with a year at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York, followed by a year at the Bellevue Hospital Medical College, where he studied pathology under William H. Welch and received his M. D. degree in 1879. He interned at Bellevue Hospital under such physicians as Abraham Jacobi, Edward G. Janeway, and the elder Austin Flint .
Career
After beginning private practice in Providence in 1880, Chapin also served for a few years as part-time pathologist at the Rhode Island Hospital and did medical charity work for the Providence Dispensary. He was on the faculty of Brown University between 1882 and 1895 as part-time professor of physiology. Admittedly lacking a comforting bedside manner with patients, and impatient with the routine of private practice, Chapin in 1884 welcomed appointment as Superintendent of Health of Providence, the beginning of a career that was to make him internationally known. He remained in the position forty-eight years, adding in 1888 the duties of city registrar; statisticians and epidemiologists agreed that the data he compiled were unsurpassed by those of any other American city for accuracy and completeness. With Gardner T. Swarts he established, in 1888, the first municipal bacteriological laboratory in the United States. There, among more routine work, they performed pioneer tests of mechanical water filters and examinations of disinfectants. Adopting diagnostic methods developed elsewhere in the 1890's, Chapin made bacteriological analysis the practical basis of the fight to control diseases like diphtheria, though he subsequently found that he had to make some compromises between the scientific application of these methods and the realities of social conditions. Contemporaries regarded Chapin as an iconoclast because he vigorously attacked outmoded medical and sanitary theories: among them, the idea that filth caused disease, that diseases were indiscriminately transmitted through the air, and that disinfection was a cure-all for sanitary evils. To replace theory, he conducted painstaking field studies and statistical analyses of the incidence of common infectious diseases and synthesized this knowledge with the pertinent findings of the extensive laboratory research of the day. He concluded that the ordinary infectious diseases of temperate climates were spread principally through contact between persons. Conversely, in the absence of sera or vaccines, he believed the most effective means of preventing such spreading were the control of carriers of disease who were themselves well, and strict observance of the precautions of personal cleanliness. He announced these findings in his famous book of 1910, The Sources and Modes of Infection. In the new Providence City Hospital which he secured in 1910--an isolation hospital for patients with infectious disease--aseptic nursing principles were successfully applied, and the hospital became a model for similar institutions across the United States. An effective speaker and productive writer, he was among the foremost of those who, early in the twentieth century, shaped this broadened concept of community health, which carried public health work beyond environmental sanitation and the control of a few infectious diseases to a wide variety of preventive and curative services focusing on the individual. These services, carried out by lay health organizations as well as by official bodies, included such innovations as the antituberculosis campaign, the infant hygiene movement, inspection and care of schoolchildren, and public medical attention for the sick poor. His insistence, that health officers rate (on a numerical scale) the importance of the various segments of their work and turn over to other agencies those activities, such as garbage collection, which had only a minor or indirect relation to health prompted many health officers to reappraise their functions, and his Report on State Public Health Work (1916), based on his comprehensive survey, exerted considerable influence. He retired in 1932, at the age of seventy-six, and died nine years later in Providence of general arteriosclerosis. After funeral services at the Central Congregational Church, of which he had long been a member, he was buried in Swan Point Cemetery, Providence.
Achievements
Chapin was one of the earliest American health officers to apply the techniques and findings of bacteriology to sanitary science.
Chapin also contributed much to the practical administration of public health work at all levels in the United States.
Chapin served as president of the American Public Health Association (1926 - 27) and as the first president (1927) of the American Epidemiological Society.
Charles Chapin was one of a brilliant group of American public health leaders--including Hermann M. Biggs, William T. Sedgwick, Victor C. Vaughan , and Theobald Smith, as well as William H. Welch--whose generation had remarkable success in reducing human disease and extending life expectancy. In the process he, probably more than anyone else, brought about a change in the image of the American health officer from that of political hack and chaser of smells to that of professional scientist.
(Originally published in 1912. This volume from the Cornel...)
Personality
Personally modest, physically frail, and intellectually honest and plainspoken, Chapin had a high sense of duty to his community.
Interests
His few leisure-time activities--sailing, reading mystery stories, and the pursuit of genealogy and studies of Rhode Island history--were all carried on with his family.
Connections
On May 6, 1886, he married Anna Augusta Balch of Providence; they had one child, Howard Millar Chapin, later librarian of the Rhode Island Historical Society.
Father:
Joshua Bicknell Chapin
He was a physician, druggist, photographer, and state Commissioner of Education
Mother:
Jane Catherine Louise (Value) Chapin
Spouse:
Anna Augusta Balch
Son:
Howard Millar Chapin
He was a librarian of the Rhode Island Historical Society
