Herbert Spencer Ratner, also known as Herbert Albert Ratner (May 23, 1907 – December 6, 1997), was an American physician and philosopher. He taught and wrote on the philosophy and history of medicine and was a popular lecturer on marriage and the family. Ratner was the director of public health for the community of Oak Park, Illinois, for twenty-five years. An advocate of preventive family medicine based on natural norms, he was also a long-time proponent of informed medical consent, and played a pivotal role in the polio vaccine controversy beginning in 1955. For more than twenty-nine years Ratner was editor of Child and Family Quarterly, a paramedical journal which ran articles on the Hippocratic Oath, infant development, women’s health, and other topics related to family health.
Early life
The youngest of seven children born in New York City to Russian-Jewish immigrants Leo and Sophia “Sonia” (née Maazel), and named after the English philosopher Herbert Spencer, Ratner grew up in Manhattan. His mother Sonia, who had sung professionally as a young woman, was the sister of Isaac Maazel who was a first violinist at the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra after formerly having been concert master to the czar.. National Council of Jewish Women, Pittsburgh Section Oral History Collection at the University of Pittsburgh. Respondent Lincoln Maazel. Interview date November 11, 1994. Ratner's father Leo was a physician, a graduate of New York Medical College (1892). A socialist who had no use for religion, he died when Ratner was fourteen leaving him dependent on his older brothers for the financing of his education during the years of the Great Depression. These brothers were George, a dentist who was one of the first to use x-rays in dentistry; Bret, a pediatrician and immunologist who was author of a popular textbook of pediatrics; and Victor, at one time vice-president of advertising and sales promotion for CBS. Two other siblings Mary and Walter died in early childhood. A remaining sister Helen died in 1938 of tuberculosis after a lengthy illness.
University of Michigan years
After attending Los Angeles Public High School in California his freshman year and DeWitt Clinton Public High School in New York the remaining three years, Ratner went on to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. There he received the B.A. degree in 1929, completed his medical studies in 1934, and received the M.D. degree in 1935. While in Ann Arbor he married fellow medical student Dorothy Smith who received the M.D. degree in 1934 after having attended public high school in Swanton, Ohio and after having received the B.A. degree at Toledo University. She was born in Sylvania Township, Lucas County, Ohio, the daughter of a farm family of twelve children and the granddaughter of Yankee and German-American settlers in the county.
As a research assistant in the Pasteur Institute of the University of Michigan Ratner spent two years (1929-1931) teaching in the department of bacteriology under the legendary Dr. Frederick G. Novy, a strict taskmaster who had studied in Berlin under Robert Koch and at the Pasteur Institute in Paris under the immediate successor of Louis Pasteur. Dorothy for her part was a teaching assistant in physiology for one year.
From 1934 to 1936 Herbert and Dorothy were research assistants under Dr. Louis H. Newburgh in the Division of Clinical Investigation at the University of Michigan. While Dorothy earned an M.A. in nutrition, Herbert studied public health and in off hours took extracurricular courses in philosophy from his one-time classmate Herbert Schwartz who had studied philosophy under Richard McKeon at Columbia University. Before leaving the University of Michigan with Dorothy for a year in New York to be near his mother while his sister was dying, Ratner became interested in the philosophy and history of medicine.
University of Chicago years
In 1937 Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, appointed Ratner a senior member of the Committee on Liberal Arts of the University of Chicago, a position he held until 1939. There he did research in the history of medicine as an assistant to Mortimer Adler, the founder of the Great Books Program, with whom he shared an office. This was a time of intellectual ferment when the neo-Scholastic movement was sweeping American academia. A re-examination of the great minds of the past – Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas – was taking place. Ratner was particularly interested in how classical thought interfaced with modern medicine.
Another phenomenon was also taking place at the University of Chicago among Ratner’s friends and acquaintances. Impressed with the writings of Thomas Aquinas, many were becoming attracted to the Catholic Church. One psychiatrist friend and medical school classmate became a Trappist monk. Having been raised with no religion by an atheist father, Ratner, too, felt this attraction and entered the Catholic Church in 1938. He remained a committed Catholic throughout his life, becoming an active, long-time member of the Chicago Catholic Physicians’ Guild, as well as serving a term as president of the National Federation of Catholic Physicians Guilds, which later was renamed the Catholic Medical Association.
Professional appointments, positions, and publications
In 1939 through 1940 Ratner was scientific consultant to Robert Maynard Hutchins. During 1941 he took a year-long general internship at Loretto Hospital in Chicago. Between 1942 and 1949, and to some extent beyond this time, Ratner was in private practice in Chicago as a general practitioner. In 1942 Ratner was appointed director of Student Health and associate clinical professor of Family and Community Medicine at the Stritch School of Medicine of Loyola University in Chicago. Between 1946 and 1948 he served as medical consultant to the Encyclopædia Britannica Great Books Syntopicon. In 1949 Ratner accepted the position of full-time director of public health in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, an appointment he held until 1974. In 1979 he was appointed visiting professor of Community and Preventive Medicine at New York Medical College, an appointment he held until 1997. From 1954 to 1956 Ratner was editor of the Bulletin of the American Association of Public Health Physicians. From 1956 until 1997 he served as senior advisor to La Leche League, and was considered by that organization to be one of its “founding fathers.” In May 1962 the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions published Ratner’s landmark analysis (in its American Character series) of the state of American medicineMedicine: An Interview by Donald McDonald with Herbert Ratner, M.D. One of a Series of Interviews on the American Character. Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Comment by Scott Buchanan. Santa Barbara, California: Fund for the Republic, May, 1962. that later was reprinted in the Saturday Review. In 1967 Ratner helped to found and became secretary-treasurer of the National Commission on Human Life, Reproduction and Rhythm. This was the first national anti-abortion organization to be founded in the United States, having at the time of its incorporation in 1967 a membership entirely of physicians from various parts of the United States. A speech titled "Right to Live" that Ratner gave in the sixties can be heard on YouTube. In 1968 he became the editor of Child & Family Quarterly, a position he held until 1997.Baggott, M.T., ed. Nature, the Physician, and the Family: Selected Writings of Herbert Ratner, M.D., Bloomington, Indiana:AuthorHouse, 2007, pp. 357–58.
A pioneer in family mental health and informed consent
While he was a director of public health Ratner became a pioneer in the field of preventive family mental health when for many years he conducted seasonal film and discussion forums for young families. As director of public health Ratner also became a pioneer in the field of informed medical consent when he held full disclosure sessions on polio vaccine for the parents of young children in his community. Under his directorship Oak Park was the only community in the state of Illinois to delay participation in the 1955 Salk Polio Vaccine Program – sponsored by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis for first- and second-grade school children – in order that informed-medical-consent sessions for parents could be scheduled beforehand by the health department.Baggott 2007, p. 331.
After oral contraceptives came on the market Ratner became aware of the work of Dr. Edmond Kassouf of Cranford, New Jersey who was one of the first to observe a connection between thrombophlebitis and the oral contraceptives of the early sixties. About that same time Ratner had made an association of increased deaths with use of the contraceptive pill. The two physicians met as a result of a talk Ratner had given in 1964 and resolved to enlighten both physicians and women as to the side-effects of the oral contraceptives. They were path breakers in the field of informed consent by successfully lobbying for a standard of medical disclosure for oral contraceptives which would reflect the full range of deleterious side effects then being reported in the medical literature. As a result of the pro-informed-consent testimony by Kassouf, Ratner, and othersThe Nelson Hearings on Oral Contraceptives. Testimony. Problems in the Drug Industry, Part 16. Oral Contraceptives (Vol. 2), Hearings before the Subcommittee on Monopoly of the Select Committee on Small Business, United States Senate, February 24, 25, March 3, 4, 1970. As reprinted in Child & Family Quarterly 9:349–76, 1970. at the Nelson Congressional Hearings on Oral Contraceptives the government in 1970 mandated a package insert listing the then-known risks of death and injury from oral contraceptives. This event was a milestone in the history of informed consent in the United States.Physicians’ Package Insert, Ortho Tri-Cyclen Tablets and Ortho Cyclen Tablets, 2005.
In 1974 Ratner testified before a State House of Representatives committee in Springfield, Illinois, in support of a medical informed-consent bill sponsored by State Representative Harry Yourell. This bill was apparently the first medical-consent bill to be proposed and adopted in a state legislative committee. However, the bill never reached the House floor.
Role in Salk vaccine controversy
Earlier in his career Ratner had been particularly concerned about the irregular manner in which the Salk vaccine had been licensed on April 12, 1955. Because of outside pressure the licensing committee in charge of approving the vaccine program did so after deliberating for only two hours and without first having read the full research, namely the Francis Report on which their approval was to have been based.Carter, Richard. Breakthrough: The Saga of Jonas Salk. New York: Trident Press, 1965, p. 282. (Francis did not issue the final report of his evaluation of the 1954 Field Trials until April 1957, two years after the licensing of the vaccine.)Francis T, Napier JA, Voight RB, et al. "Evaluation of the 1954 field trial of poliomyelitis vaccine: Final report.’’ Ann Arbor, Mich: Poliomyelitis Vaccine Evaluation Center, University of Michigan, 1957.