Newest Portraits

Prior to the arrival of C. Everett Koop (1916-2013) as Surgeon General of the United States in 1982, the position was a relatively low profile affair held by career officers dedicated to the task of gathering data on matters related to public health and suggesting policies to address problems uncovered thereby. In 1964, Surgeon General Luther Terry published a report on the dangers of tobacco, and before him, in 1959, Leroy Burney released an important report on environmental

Sometimes, science goes pfft. A promising line of investigation is begun, resources are marshalled, research is conducted, and at the end of it all, in spite of a mass of cleverness and a wealth of honorable intentions, what you are left with is decades of data that sum to a shrug. Results inconclusive. Better luck next life. The question, then, for us as science history enthusiasts, is what to do with the individuals who, through no fault of their ow

At the height of the siege of Vicksburg during the American Civil War, Emily Parsons (1824-1880) acted as the tireless supervisor of nurses at the Benton Barracks Hospital, where thousands of the war’s injured were sent for treatment after their long and physically harrowing journey up the Mississippi. Reading the letters she sent home during this time, one gets a glimpse into the demands of the position - the organizing of individualized care for a constantly shifting roster

1200 miles in 90 days. On horseback. Through unmapped territory. Through blizzards. In her fifties. Through Canadian wilderness. In the 1930s. With 12 carrier pigeons in case of emergency. To collect rare plants. This was how Mary Gibson Henry (1884 - 1967) rolled Henry’s road to becoming one of the great botanical adventurers of her, or any, age, was a long delayed one, but when it came, it came with a vengeance. She was born in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, in 1884, to a moth

On November 11, 1938, Mary Mallon, the woman known to the papers and to all of history ever after as Typhoid Mary, passed away on North Brother Island, where she had been lodged by the New York City Department of Health for the previous 23 years to safeguard the general population from the disease which she carried. Her life’s course since 1907 had been entirely determined by the persistence in her body of an illness that, to her dying day, she insisted she never had, but whi