Joseph Nathaniel McCormack was born on November 9, 1847 on a farm near Howard's Mill, Nelson County, Kentucky. His father, Thomas McCormack, was a native of County Fermanagh, Ireland. His mother, Elizabeth Brown, was of a Pennsylvania family which migrated to Kentucky.
McCormack attended the local schools until the age of thirteen, after which he worked on the farm and in a store operated by his father. In 1868 he matriculated in the medical department of the Miami University at Cincinnati, which gave him the degree of M. D. in 1870.
After an internship in the Cincinnati General Hospital, McCormack returned to his father's home in Nelson County, Kentucky, for practice. In 1875, he moved to Bowling Green. Here, during an epidemic of yellow fever in 1878-79, he attracted the attention of Gov. Luke P. Blackburn, himself a physician, with the result that McCormack was appointed to the State Board of Health shortly after its formation in 1879. He had been a general practitioner with a leaning toward surgery, in which branch he was quite expert. The new appointment, however, focused his interest on the problems of public health, particularly those of the rural districts of his native state. When he was appointed secretary of the state board in 1883, he found it necessary to abandon his private practice. During the thirty years of his tenure of this office he was responsible for many noteworthy reforms.
His ability as an organizer was recognized by the president, Dr. Charles A. L. Reed of Cincinnati, who found the organization in dire straits from an unworkable constitution and internal dissension. McCormack and his colleagues after a year's work brought in a draft of a new constitution and a plan for the rehabilitation of the society. These were presented at the St. Paul meeting in 1901 and adopted after a prolonged debate. It then became McCormack's function to put through the committee's plan by bringing all eligibles into the society and making them subscribers to its journal. To further these purposes he journeyed from state to state and even from county to county. It is said that he delivered his address, "The New Gospel of Health and Long Life, " in a majority of the counties of the United States. As a result, the membership of the society was greatly increased, the subscriptions to the journal multiplied six fold, and the erection of a permanent home for the association in Chicago was made possible. He was a member of the House of Delegates of the Association (1902 - 07) and of its Council of Health and Public Instruction (1910 - 13). He resigned from the Association work in 1913 and from the Kentucky state board the same year, but was retained as state sanitary inspector. In the meantime he had been instrumental in the erection and equipment of a model office and laboratory building in Louisville for the State Board of Health. In this building hangs an oil portrait of him, a gift of the medical profession of the state. He died in Louisville, his home after 1913, from a cerebral hemorrhage.
In the legislature of 1882, McCormack caused the introduction of the state's first medical practice act, which failed of passage until the session of 1888. He drafted the state's first sanitary code and was a potent influence in its enactment into law. He followed this achievement with a state-wide campaign of education upon sanitary measures which led to a much-needed reorganization of the Kentucky State Medical Society and of its constituent county societies. The success of these activities gave McCormack a national reputation in public-health work. In 1892, he was made a member of the International Quarantine Commission. He was a member of the National Conference of State Boards of Health (1888 - 94) and of the National Conference of State Licensing and Examining Boards (1899). His most notable service to the medical profession as a whole was his chairmanship (1899 - 1913) of the committee on organization of the American Medical Association. Many honors came to him. He was made president of the state medical society in 1884 and was elected a member of the state legislature in 1912. In 1888, he received the personal thanks of President Cleveland for his work in the cholera epidemic.
McCormack was valedictorian of his class and delivered a thesis upon the physical and mental equality of man and woman.
Physically he was above medium height, slight of build in his younger years but taking on more weight in later life. He was notably courteous and dignified, with a gift of persuasion in any cause that he advocated.
McCormack was married in Bowling Green, to Corinne Crenshaw of Glasgow, Kentucky, on September 14, 1871. A son, Dr. A. T. McCormack, succeeded him on the state board when he resigned in 1913.
1847 - 1932
August 21, 1872 – August 7, 1943 McCormack was an American physician best known for serving as the chief public health officer of the Kentucky Department of Health from 1913 to 1943.
