Edgar sydenstricker deserves a spot on any list of the “giants” of public health. After joining the Public Health Service, he worked on classic studies about the link between economic conditions and health among textile workers in New York City.1 Perhaps, most famously, he worked with Joseph Goldberger on pellagra in the American South, a case study still taught frequently in introductory public health courses for its incisive acumen about disease causation. And, as if that were not sufficient, as the head of the Office of Statistical Investigations, he started the Hagerstown (Maryland) Morbidity Survey that eventually became the US National Health Survey. He had a front row seat to, and was a participant in, the rapidly growing field of public health in the first quarter of the twentieth century. His classic article, “The Changing Concept of Public Health,” published in The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly in 1935, just a year before his untimely death at age 54, represents a culmination of a professional lifetime of engagement with public health.2 It served as a statement both of the challenges the United States faced in health as he saw them, and the opportunities he thought were possible if we adopted a broader view of health than was then, and still is now, the case.
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