Background
James Stevens Simmons was born on June 7, 1890 in Newton, North Carolina, the son of James Curtley and Angie Mary Stevens Simmons. When he was four, the family moved to Graham, North Carolina, where his father was a druggist.
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(Global Epidemiology: A Geography of Disease and Sanitatio...)
Global Epidemiology: A Geography of Disease and Sanitation, Volume I presents a survey of the medical, health, and sanitary conditions of various geographic areas of the world. The book brings together certain data, based on surveys made for the Medical Department of the United States Army. This volume includes medical information about India, the Far East, and the Pacific area. The text aims to provide vital information to meet the problems of international health and the spread of disease. The monograph will be of use to epidemiologists, health workers, physicians, and public health experts.
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bacteriologist army medical officer
James Stevens Simmons was born on June 7, 1890 in Newton, North Carolina, the son of James Curtley and Angie Mary Stevens Simmons. When he was four, the family moved to Graham, North Carolina, where his father was a druggist.
He graduated with a B. S. degree from Davidson (North Carolina) College in 1911, then attended the University of North Carolina School of Medicine for two years. He completed his medical training at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, from which he received the M. D. in 1915.
He earned the Ph. D. from George Washington University in 1934; and while stationed in Boston as assistant corps area surgeon (1937 - 1939), he received the Doctor of Public Health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health (1939).
His primary interest was laboratory medicine. Simmons participated in the preparedness movement by entering the Army Medical Reserve Corps as a first lieutenant in July 1916. Within a year he had been graduated from the Army Medical School and had been commissioned in the regular army, beginning a thirty-year career in the military.
Simmons' major assignments within the continental United States included Walter Reed Hospital, where he was chief of laboratory service (1919), and the Army Medical School, where he was assistant director of laboratories (1924 - 1925), chief bacteriologist (1924-1928, 1930 - 1934), and director of laboratories and of the department of preventive medicine (1932 - 1934). He pursued his interest in epidemiology, specifically with regard to insect vectors, in Hawaii (1920 - 1921), the Philippines (1928 - 1930), and the Canal Zone (1934 - 1936).
He worked on typhoid fever, tubercle bacilli, leprosy, and cerebrospinal meningitis. Simmons published widely in these areas and served as editor-in-chief of the fourth and fifth editions of Laboratory Methods of the U. S. Army (1935, 1944).
Simmons' career in bacteriology and epidemiology prepared him for his role in military preventive medicine in World War II. As a lieutenant colonel, Simmons was assigned in 1939 to the Office of the Surgeon General of the Army, where he developed and directed a brilliantly successful program to safeguard the health of American fighting men.
As chief of the Preventive Medicine Service from 1940 to 1946, he organized and directed the branches of sanitation, sanitary engineering, epidemiology, tropical disease control, venereal disease control, and nutrition.
Under his supervision a medical intelligence branch collected information about health and disease in foreign countries and disseminated it to American commanders; and a military occupational hygiene section oversaw working conditions in war industries and also studied the hazards encountered in using mechanized warfare vehicles.
Near the end of the war, a division of civil public health was added to Simmons' service to provide emergency protection to civilians in liberated and occupied countries.
Simmons described his work in "Preventive Medicine in the Army, " a chapter in Morris Fishbein's Doctors at War (1945). He was promoted to brigadier general in 1943. Through his involvement in the Office of Scientific Research and Development and the National Research Council (1941 - 1946), Simmons enlisted the cooperation of various governmental and private bodies in the work of the Preventive Medicine Service. This cooperative research resulted in the first widespread use of DDT to control insect-borne disease.
The success of these programs led Simmons to advocate substantial government support of scientific research after the war. Simmons won the Distinguished Service Medal for his military contributions.
He was president of the National Malaria Society (1942), the American Society of Tropical Medicine (1946), and the American Academy of Tropical Medicine (1946). After retiring from the army in 1946, Simmons was appointed dean of the Harvard School of Public Health. His appointment was part of a plan to rebuild the school as an independent unit of the university, and within two years Simmons had doubled the size of both the student body and the faculty.
The school introduced new areas of teaching and research covering the whole spectrum of modern public health. From 1948 through 1951, Simmons was president of the Association of Schools of Public Health. His army experience led him to favor a national mobilization of health resources.
He lobbied and lectured widely on the need for increased funding for schools of public health and for the creation of the National Science Foundation. With the advent of the Cold War, Simmons paid special attention to the long-standing international role of the Harvard School of Public Health, traveling extensively in Africa and Asia to build "international bridges of health. " On one such journey, in March 1954, Simmons suffered a heart attack in Tokyo. He never recovered fully, and died from another heart attack in Hartford, Connecticut.
(Global Epidemiology: A Geography of Disease and Sanitatio...)
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On June 29, 1920, he married Blanche Scott, a childhood friend. They had one child.