Some of the Charter Members

The American Epidemiological Society was, at the start, a small, but fervent organization. The founding fathers who controlled it played an earnest and meaningful role in the early life of this organization which could not help but contribute to its success. In order to give some idea of the personalities involved, brief biographical sketches of a few of the charter members are given. Those 26 persons to whom Emerson and Godfrey had sent out letters of invitation in October 1927 and from whom they had received favorable replies, I believe, represent the true charter members of our Society. Another and longer list which bears the name of "Charter Members of the AES" has been unearthed among Haven Emerson's notes, made in the early years of his secretaryship. This list of 40, includes the names of 14 who were elected at the first meeting of the Society, but I have chosen the original 26 as the official charter members. In the early years there seemed to be no need to enlarge the Society beyond the group of 40 mentioned on Emerson's second list. At least it was an ideal group for the type of spirited discussions which were held at AES meetings for the next 5 years. It may be of interest to see what the backgrounds of some of this early group of 40 had been. Three of the men (Frost, Leake and Maxcy) had spent longer or shorter periods of apprenticeship on what might be called observational and statistical epidemiological field studies which dealt with subjects such as polio-myelitis, influenza, and murine typhus. Their activities qualified them as the real epidemiologists of their time. Chapin, Godfrey and Emerson had been municipal or state health officers, but could be classified as academic epidemiologists according to contemporary standards. Aycock and Park had started out essentially as microbiologists, but had ended up as specialists in the application of microbiologi-cal and statistical techniques in the field of preventive medicine. Zinsser had also been a microbiologist but it is difficult to classify him in his later years. He certainly qualified as an epidemiologist in the days when the subject was almost entirely concerned with infectious disease; but he was also a writer of merit and a philosopher of medicine and the health of the public, in all its aspects. Opie was a pathologist who interpreted pathology in the true sense of the word-namely, the …