Acknowledgments
This work is the fruit of the Cambridge History and Geography of Human Disease Project that was launched in late 1985. During the six years or so it took to complete, we have accumulated a considerable amount of indebtedness.
That incurred by individual authors is acknowledged in their essays. It is my pleasure, however, to acknowledge the indebtedness of the project as a whole to many splendid individuals and institutions.Funding for the project was provided as needed by various offices on the Bowling Green State University campus from beginning to end. Louis Katzner, Dean of the Graduate School, and Gary Hess, Chair of the History Department, made certain that the project was always staffed by at least one graduate assistant, and often two, on a year-round basis. The History Department also purchased computer equipment for the project including an optical scanner, made an office available for the staff, and provided secretarial service. Indeed, I shudder to think at what stage the effort would still be without Connie Willis, Judy Gilbert, and Phyllis Wulff, who performed a myriad of tasks including the typing of hundreds of letters and retyping of dozens of essays.
In addition, Christopher Dunn, Director of Research Services, helped us struggle with fundraising problems and made “seed money” available, whereas the Faculty Research Committee provided a salary and travel funds during two of the summers spent on the project. Finally, Eloise Clark, Vice President for Academic Affairs, gave us the resources needed to meet our payrolls on two critical occasions.
Seed money from outside the university was awarded to the project in 1986 by Cambridge University Press, the Hoffman-La Roche Corporation, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, and the Milbank Memorial Fund. These monies were absolutely crucial in the early stages of the project both to launch it and to instill in us some confidence that others besides ourselves thought the effort important.
A grant from the Earhart Foundation in 1987 helped to keep the project moving, and in 1988 the generosity of the National Endowment for the Humanities (Tools Division) made available the necessary funds to see it through to completion in late 1990.1 am enormously grateful to all of these very fine organizations.The project was born of discussions with Frank Smith, our editor at Cambridge University Press, and Frank has been extraordinarily supportive of the effort from the very first. That support, however, was much more than just encouragement from the sidelines. Frank was involved with the project’s conceptualization; he helped to assemble the Board of Editors, and, on more than one occasion, found authorities to write essays that I had become convinced would go unwritten. To say that without his support this project would have never been realized is merely to state the obvious.
I would also like to acknowledge the considerable effort on our behalf made by copy editors Rosalind Corman and Mary Racine who, under the direction of Sophia Prybylski, were not at all intimidated by the four thousand or so manuscript pages of the project. Rather they scrutinized each and every page, frequently calling us to task, and forcing upon us that last round of writing, checking, and double checking that is so important but so painful. On the other hand, there are those who saved us a great deal of pain, and I am most grateful to some very gifted as well as good-hearted scholars who helped us with the intricacies of accenting, spelling, even rendering languages we had absolutely no competence in. These are board members Nancy Gallagher and Paul Unschuld; Oliver Phillips of the University of Kansas; and Bowling Green colleagues Ed Chen, Larry Daly, Fujiya Kawashima, and Kriemhild Conee Ornelas.
Three generations of graduate students at Bowling Green have labored on the project, some for considerable periods of time, checking sources, entering essays into our computer equipment, preparing indexes, and performing countless other chores, including tutoring the rest of us on increasingly complex computer hardware and software.
I thank them all. If these individuals were with us for a year or more, we have listed them as the associate editors they, in fact, were. Others who were with us for only a semester appear as assistant editors, but these distinctions are in no way intended to indicate reflections on the quality of the effort they gave us.Rachael R. Graham has been the only permanent staff member to work on the project, and, as Executive Editor, it is she who has provided the continuity that kept the project from sliding into the abyss of chaos on numerous occasions. She also imposed stylistic continuity on it by reading, with marvelously critical eyes, each of our some 200 entries countless times, researching many of them, and working with the authors to completely rewrite a few. In addition, she corresponded regularly with our authors, and even as I write these words is readying a new caption listing of tables, graphs, charts, and so forth, while at the same time helping me with the latest versions of both of the indexes. It is impossible to express adequately my gratitude for all of her considerable effort and for her unfailing, and contagious, enthusiasm that accompanied it. But I shall try anyway with a simple “Thank you, Rachael.” I also thank her husband, James Q. Graham, Jr., for all of his labors on our behalf in acquiring and setting up our various pieces of computer equipment. Finally I thank him for the considerable patience he exercised during years of hearing about the project from both of us and for the very good advice he provided on many occasions, just to prove he was still listening.
I am immensely grateful as well for all of the splendid advice given, and critical reviewing done, by the board members, some of whom, like Philip Curtin and Ann Carmichael, helped to initiate the project. The board members recommended most of the authors for the project, in many cases wrote essays themselves, and read essays in their areas of expertise for scientific and historical accuracy.
Because of the nature of that expertise, some, such as Tom Benedek, Jim Cassedy, Arthur Kleinman, Steve Kunitz, Ron Numbers, Dave Patterson, and Paul Unschuld, were called upon with sufficient frequency to provoke a bit of “testiness.” But the collective performance of the entire board constituted a remarkable display of the highest possible standards of scholarship, right to the end when Ann Carmichael, Nancy Gallagher, Ron Numbers, and Guenter Risse more or less cheerfully helped in reading the Name Index. In some cases revisions called for by our board members were not made, or were only partially made. Negotiations with individual authors account for some of these differences, disagreement in the reports of board members account for more, and, on occasion, editorial decisions in our office were the reason. This is all by way of saying that despite the board members’ incredible amounts of selfless input, only the authors and I bear final responsibility for the essays in this volume.This work is, of course, first and foremost the product of those who wrote it, and my admiration for, and gratitude to, our 160 or so authors is boundless. Surely, as experts in their fields with countless other things besides this project to worry about, many of them must have felt sorely put upon by our (occasional) seemingly endless demands on their time. Doubtless this was very often the case for those contributors in faraway countries, when we encountered both technical and linguistic problems of communication as drafts, revisions, advice, criticism, and corrections traveled uncertainly back and forth via telephone, faxlines, and the mail services. Yet even if we tried the patience of many, the complaints have been few, and I thank all of the authors for the tremendous effort that their work represents and the wisdom it contains.
One of the great pleasures of any new project is that it generally brings new friends, and this one brought them by the score. But a project of this magnitude is also likely to bring sadness, and so it did as seven of our authors died while the work was still in progress. The loss of Michael Dols, Wilbur Downs (a board member as well), Lu Gwei-Djen, R. H. Kampmeier1 Edward H. Kass, John L. Kemink, and Jerry Stannard was a heavy one for medicine and for its history.
During the course of the project, I also lost one of the best friends any person could hope for, when Miguel M. Omelas, Director of Affirmative Action and Handicapped Services at Bowling Green State University, passed away. And it is to his memory, and to the memory of our seven colleagues on the project, that I dedicate this book.