Modern public health can be traced to May 14, 1796, when Edward Jenner inoculated a young boy, James Phipps, with cowpox material taken from a sore on the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a milkmaid infected with cowpox. Jenner was trying to mimic nature. He had observed that milkmaids appeared to be protected from smallpox disease. A subsequent attempt to infect Phipps with smallpox was unsuccessful. The boy had been protected by the cowpox inoculation.
Although many references to prevention and public health are found in both biblical and other historic writings, Jenner’s success marked the first time an actual tool was available to improve individual health and the health of people in the aggregate. Modern public health was now possible.
Linking public health, and specifically the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to Jenner’s work is an acknowledgment of our debt to that event. The CDC originally focused on communicable diseases, and immunizations and vaccines continue to be the foundation of public health. But the field has been expanded in one lifetime to encompass occupational hazards, environmental problems, intentional and unintentional injuries, chronic diseases, and mental health. The mission now embraces all types of barriers to health—biological, chemical, behavioral, violent, and environmental—and recognizes positive ways to enhance quality of life.
I have been a list keeper throughout my life, keeping track of countries visited, trips taken, books read, quotations recalled, and lessons learned. Over the years, I have been intrigued by mentors I have never met, except through reading, and I have tried to divine what advice they might have had for me at different junctures in my life. Many of these influences, in one form or another, made it into this book.
This book is not a history of the CDC nor is it a history of public health or the breadth of CDC activities. It is a collection of stories. By telling these stories, I hope to illuminate the roles that, thanks to the CDC, my colleagues and I played at important moments in the history of global health and to reveal some of the lessons learned along the way.