Topic: Public Health

1920s

Fever Foundation: The Rockefeller Foundation’s Malaria Fever Therapy Program & Ethics of Experimentation (1931-1940)

“My body was shaking uncontrollably, my teeth were chattering,” remembered Nathan Leopold. “You think from moment to moment that your head is going to split, and you wish to gosh it would!”Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Life Plus 99 Years (Greenwood Press, 1974), 321. Describing the viciousness of the malaria with which he was purposely infected in…

A grayscale photograph of three distinct shells of snails found in gravel, mud, and sand.

Of Snails and Self-Infection: Claude Barlow’s Fight against Schistosomiasis during World War II

How one Rockefeller scientist walked the edge of ethics, endangered himself and offended colleagues to move research forward

Two white men in suits and ties address a room full of mostly male journalists at the United Nations Population Conference in Bucharest in 1974.
1970s

“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.

1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 2000s

The Rockefeller Foundation’s 20th-Century Global Fight Against Disease

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.

1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s

Eradication or Control? The Rockefeller Foundation’s Global Anti-Malaria Campaigns

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

1930s 1940s

World War II & the Rockefeller Foundation

Saving threatened scholars and confronting a dramatically changed world.

1910s

World War I & the Rockefeller Foundation

Global war drew a new philanthropy into relief work.

Black-and-white image of an American Red Cross sanitation vehicle

Timeline: American Foundations and the History of Public Health

Key points in the history of American foundations’ engagement with public health.

Philanthropy’s Search for an HIV Vaccine: Building Public-Private Partnerships in a Global Pandemic

How a meeting of scientists and health experts sparked a new international campaign to find a way to prevent AIDS.

Cover Your Mouth: Controlling an Epidemic Through Hygiene

Century-old tips to prevent infection still make sense today.