#usphs

Dr. Leonard Scheele explored Building 6 on the @NIH campus in September 1939. It was the brand new home of his National Cancer Control Program at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). After being assigned to the military in World War II, he became director of NCI in 1947. Scheele succeeded Thomas Parran as Surgeon General in 1948, serving until 1956.

I drew mochis last night

In 1914, Dr. Walter L. Treadway conducted the first survey on mental health for the Hygienic Laboratory, precursor agency of #NIH. He studied the role of public and private agencies in ministering to social needs. In 1929, he became the founding chief of the Division of Mental Hygiene, a forerunner of the National Institute of Mental Health, in the Public Health Service (PHS). Treadway found that drug addiction and mental disorders are not limited to one class of people, and advocated for a medical, rather than law enforcement, approach to addiction. He helped to get PHS narcotics hospitals established in Lexington, Kentucky and Fort Worth, Texas in the mid-1930s.

In 1894, Dr. Joseph Kinyoun traveled from New York to France’s Pasteur Institute to learn about the new diphtheria antitoxin from Emile Roux.  Diphtheria was a personal enemy of Kinyoun’s; his three year-old daughter had died from it, and the death of a four year-old from it had nearly caused him to abandon his medical career years before that.  Kinyoun was ecstatic about the new treatment in which horses that had been infected with diphtheria were bled and the antitoxin serum given to patients.  He brought the technique back to the Hygienic Laboratory of the U.S. Marine Hospital Service, which soon began producing the antitoxin.  It was the first step in the Laboratory becoming the place where all antitoxins, vaccines, and serums manufactured in the U.S. were tested for safety and efficacy, a job now done by the Food and Drug Administration. Kinyoun’s laboratory was the precursor to the National Institutes of Heath.

In the Butler Building in Washington, D.C., the Hygienic Laboratory had room to spread out, which enabled many more physicians to make their way through Joseph Kinyoun’s training in bacteriology and public health.  In this photo from about 1899 are Hill Hastings, Ezra Sprague, Kinyoun, Hugh Cumming, John Eager, William McIntosh, and Louis Williams.  Cumming later became Surgeon General, Eager was an Assistant Surgeon General, and Williams became Chief Medical Officer on Ellis Island. Many other notable federal and state health officials trained at this precursor to the National Institutes of Health.

Even after sick people had been taken off a ship, lingering germs could spread disease, so Joseph Kinyoun investigated various chemicals and methods to disinfect both people and property.  The Kinyoun-Francis sterilizer was the culmination of that research. Kinyoun was head of the Marine Hospital Service’s Hygienic Laboratory, precursor to the National Institutes of Health, and responsible for the health of incoming immigrants and seamen.  

Two unidentified men work in the original Hygienic Laboratory in the Marine Hospital on Staten Island, New York.  Unfortunately, Joseph Kinyoun is not shown – he was the first employee of the laboratory which eventually became the National Institutes of Health.  The photo was taken sometime between 1887 and 1891.  During this time, Kinyoun trained many other federal, state, and local public health officers in the new bacteriological methods of medical research.

My friend from college requested me to draw her a self portrait type thing so she can hang it up at her house. She’s in the public health service and I couldn’t be more proud. Here is her in her uniform! done in copic markers