Charles-Edward Amory Winslow (February 4, 1877 – January 8, 1957) was an American bacteriologist and public health expert who was, according to the Encyclopedia of Public Health,"Winslow, Charles-Edward Amory.", Encyclopedia of Public Health, Ed. Lester Breslow, Gale Group, Inc., 2002. eNotes. com. 2006, 24 March 2008 <http://www.enotes.com/public-health-encyclopedia/winslow-charles-edward-amory > "a seminal figure in public health, not only in his own country, the United States, but in the wider Western world."
Winslow was born in Boston, Massachusetts and attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), obtaining a B.S. in 1898 and an M.S. in 1910.
He began his career as a bacteriologist. He met Anne Fuller Rogers when they were students in William T. Sedgwick's laboratory at M.I.T., and married her in 1907. He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology while heading the sewage experiment station from 1908 to 1910, then taught at the College of the City of New York from 1910 to 1914.
He was the youngest charter member of the Society of American Bacteriologists when that organization was founded in 1899. With Samuel Cate Prescott he published the first American textbook on the elements of water bacteriology.
In 1915 he founded the Yale Department of Public Health within the Yale Medical School, and he was professor and chairman of the Department until he retired in 1945. (The Department became the Yale School of Public Health after accreditation was introduced in 1947.) During a time dominated by discoveries in bacteriology, he emphasized a broader perspective on causation, adopting a more holistic perspective. The department under his direction was a catalyst for health reform in Connecticut. He was the first director of Yale's J.B. Pierce Laboratory, serving from 1932 to 1957. Winslow was also instrumental in founding the Yale School of Nursing.
He was the first Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Bacteriology, serving in that position from 1916 to 1944. He was also the editor of the American Journal of Public Health from 1944 to 1954. He was the curator of public health at the American Museum of Natural History from 1910 to 1922. In 1926 he became president of the American Public Health Association, and in the 1950s was a consultant to the World Health Organization.
Defining public health In 1920, Winslow published a widely-cited definition of public health in Science, describing the field as "the science and the art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting physical health and efficiency through organized community efforts for the sanitation of the environment, the control of community infections, the education of the individual in principles of personal hygiene, the organization of medical and nursing service for the early diagnosis and preventive treatment of disease, and the development of the social machinery which will ensure to every individual in the community a standard of living adequate for the maintenance of health. [...] I look to see our health departments in the coming years organizing diverse forms of sanitary and medical and nursing and social service in such fashion as to enable every citizen to realize his birthright of health and longevity."
CEA Winslow Award
The C.-E.A. Winslow Award was created by Yale University and commemorates Winslow as a pioneer in public health and medicine, who is credited with founding the second oldest school of public health in the country at Yale. Among the most widely quoted health leaders during his lifetime, Dr. Winslow believed that equal in weight with scientific ideas about health and disease was a commitment to social justice - that social ills must be the first conquest in the "conquest of epidemic disease.”
Previous winners include Peter Hotez (2024) and Kimberle Crenshaw (2023).
C.-E.A Winslow Award Recipients (1955-2015)
1955 - Friend Lee Mickle 1956 - CT PH Nursing Agencies Board 1957 - Ira V. Hiscock and Stanley H. Osborn 1958 - Elizabeth Gordon Fox 1959 - M. Allen Pond 1960 - Alfred Burgdorf 1961 - John R. Paul 1962 - Hazel V. Dudley 1963 - Martha Clifford 1964 - Louis J. Dumont 1965 - Leonard F. Menczer 1966 - Warren J. Scott 1967 - Franklin M. Foote 1968 - Edward M. Cohart 1969 - Leonard Parente 1970 - Wilbur Johnston 1971 - Florence Austin 1972 - Mrs. Chase Going Woodhouse 1973 - Edwin Meiss 1974 - James Hart 1975 - Barbara Christine 1976 - Adrian Ostfield 1977 - Estelle Siker 1978 - Fred Adams 1979 - J. Wister Meigs 1981 - Robert W. McCollum 1984 - I. S. Falk 1985 - George Silver 1986 - Ralph Gofstein 1987 - Alvin Novik 1988 - Martha Leonard 1989 - Elizabeth Bellis 1990 - Ruth Abbott 1991 - Roslyn U. Fishman 1992 - John Glasgow 1994 - Susan Addiss 1995 - James F. Jekel 1996 - Virginia S. Humphrey 1997 - James L. Hadler 1998 - Cornell Scott/Katrina Clark 1999 - Holger Hansen 2000 - Richard F. Straub 2001 - Marge Nelligan 2002 - Alfreda Turner 2003 - Elaine O'Keefe 2004 - Paul M. Shur 2005 - Joan Segal 2006 - Ruth N. Knollmueller 2007 - Katherine A. Kelley 2008 - Elaine Anderson 2009 - Michael J. Perlin 2010 - Baker Salsbury 2011 - Shelley Diehl Geballe 2012 - Patricia J. Checko 2014 - William G. Faraclas 2015 - Jeannette Ickovics 2016 - Debbie Humphries 2017 - Jennifer Kertanis
CEA Winslow The Translator In 1896, he translated, from German, « Heimat », a play in four acts by Hermann Sudermann, renamed « Magda » and played by Henry Stephenson and Charles Waldron in a Broadway theatre production in New York City, New York.
Monographs Winslow wrote nearly 600 articles and books on bacteriology, public health, sanitation, and health care administration. Among the more significant are: The Evolution and Significance of the Modern Public Health Campaign (1923) The Conquest of Epidemic Disease (1943) The History of American Epidemiology (1952).
References
External links Charles-Edward Amory Winslow papers (MS 749). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
Bibliography