Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2009; all rights reserved.
Commentary: Epidemiology in context
The Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, Boston, USA. E-mail: rosenb3@fas.harvard.edu
Accepted 7 October 2008
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In the spring of 1948, Erwin H Ackerknecht, a physician-historian newly settled at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, regretted that he might not be able to attend the annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine in Philadelphia. Two young children, shallow pockets, and chronic stomach problems made travel for the German refugee-scholar difficult and expensive. But he received a last-minute invitation to deliver the Association's prestigious Fielding Garrison lecture.1 That talk, on ‘Anticontagionism between 1821–67’ written hastily in the 2 months available to him, has since become something of a landmark—in the words of a distinguished practitioner, ‘one of the most influential essays in the history of epidemiology ...’2 In its article form, his argument has remained a reference point for debate. The issues Ackerknecht raised have retained their heuristic value, despite a variety of objections to his characterization of particular students of disease and