Topic: Medicine & Public Health
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Timeline: American Foundations and the History of Public Health
Key points in the history of American foundations’ engagement with public health.
Public Health: How the Fight Against Hookworm Helped Build a System
A hundred years ago, hookworm disease was an epidemic across the US South. Northern philanthropy tried to help.
Funding a Sexual Revolution: The Kinsey Reports
The inside story of the study that first questioned binary sexuality and spurred outcry and controversy.
“A very small number of men control all the money and the ideas”: Women Revolutionize Population Programs in the 1970s
Women and technocratic elites clashed at the 1974 World Population Conference. At stake was women’s control over their own bodies.
The Irish Language Debate: Nationalism and Rockefeller Foundation Medical Education Reform in the Irish Free State
Ireland’s independence revived the nationalist campaign for mandatory Irish language. The debate discouraged Rockefeller Foundation funders.
Centering Women’s Rights in the Population Field: The Ford Foundation and Sexual Health in the 1990s
A 1994 meeting moved women’s empowerment front and center for grantmaking in global population.
The Rockefeller Foundation’s Rural Reconstruction Program in 1930s China
In the 1930s, an ambitious program to reshape China was cut short by war, but offered a model for community development.
Legitimizing the Social Sciences: The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial in the 1920s
What began as a philanthropic fund to honor its namesake became an early force in the social sciences.
Early 20th Century Reforms of Medical Education Worldwide
Working to change US medical education was one of the Rockefeller Foundation’s biggest endeavors in the 1910s and 1920s, extending from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore to Beijing, China.
“For Initiative and for Experiment”: The International Education Board, 1923-1938
Incorporated in 1923 with funding from John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the IEB built a major scientific network in Europe and the US in only five years.
The Women Pioneers of Global Nursing Education Who Built the Rockefeller Foundation Program
A massive program in nursing education extended to 53 schools across the globe. But it never became a top priority of the foundation that supported it.