Topic: Medicine & Public Health

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.

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.

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.

Programs designed to build public health infrastructure, eradicate disease, and increase access to healthcare have formed the core of more than a hundred years of one foundation’s strategy.

Rockefeller Foundation agriculture programs begun in Mexico achieved global reach through four major research institutes. Building them was the result of partnership.

A foundation set on eradicating mosquito-born diseases had to accept that disease control was good enough.

Two decades of funding helped legitimize the study of psychiatry as a medical issue, not a problem of character.

As the scarcity of global resources became increasingly worrisome in the 20th century, these organizations more boldly approached work in population and family planning.

India was not the first country to take up the new seeds and methods developed by the Rockefeller Foundation, but the story of India’s adoption of them in the 1960s is dramatic.

The Rockefeller Foundation’s first intensive agriculture endeavor is now credited with launching the global transformation known as the “Green Revolution.”