Ten Lessons in Public Health: Inspiration for Tomorrow's Leaders

Illustrations

A young girl and her sibling at a rural camel market in northwest Iran. We encountered them after our evacuation to Iran following the onset of civil war in 1971 in East Pakistan. The crowded warrens of Old Dacca, where Jill and I got lost (and much delayed) in route to a formal dinner with Bangladesh’s first president, Abu Sayeed Chowdhury, at his official residence. It was three days before we would leave the country for the last time, after initiating smallpox control efforts and a postwar survey, in the spring of 1972. An abandoned, stripped American car from the 1940s, still useful as a playground in 1976. It was at the end of a rural village road in Indonesia . My colleague Pak Tarwotjo memorably noted, “It’s forty years old and still on the road.” Rivers were the only means of transportation in the Matlab area of East Pakistan in the 1970s. We saw giant fishing nets, like the one shown in the foreground in its raised position, at regular intervals as we traveled to the Matlab Cholera Hospital, our central research and treatment facility, seen here in the background. The Sommer family, Marni, Jill, Charles, and Al, in the garden behind our home on Jalan Setia Budhi, Bandung, Indonesia, in 1976. Charles and I are wearing Batik shirts, traditional in Indonesia. Jill feeding Marni, then four months old, during our temporary return to the former East Pakistan, newly independent and named Bangladesh, in 1972. The most common injuries we encountered during a survey of the cyclone destruction along the Bay of Bengal in late 1970 were abrasions on the inner arms and thighs and on the chest. They were caused by holding tightly to trees as the 100-foot wave of water rushed by. The name I gave this set of clinical signs was “cyclone syndrome.” Two small ferryboats housed the crew, our survey teams, our cooking facilities, and our “protein supplies” (live chickens). We towed five speed boats (three seen at left) to reach the cyclone-devastated villages along the Bay of Bengal. One ferry served as my “command ship.” It was off this boat, after what turned out to be my last day of bathing in the river at dusk, that I saw my first crocodile. Conducting field studies and randomized village-based trials of vitamin A supplementation meant first getting to the villages. The roads were often only mud ditches, sometimes further obstructed by fallen trees. In this photo, we are pushing our jeep in Aceh Province, Sumatra, Indonesia, in 1983. Examining an Indonesian child with night blindness and other evidence of xerophthalmia, the ocular manifestations of vitamin A deficiency, at the Cicendo Eye Hospital, in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1976. A worried mother and two young children with cholera on a typical cholera cot at the Cholera Research Laboratory’s research and treatment hospital in Dacca in 1971. Part of a crowd who assembled to welcome Bangladesh’s founding prime minister, Sheik Mujibur Rahman, shortly after the end of the War of Liberation and his release from a Pakistani prison in 1972. I used fake media credentials to get to the front of the stadium in which the rally took place. This page intentionally left blank ...