Smallpox vaccine pioneer lectures

In the second installment of the Voyage and Discovery lecture series, Dr. D. A. Henderson, one of the doctors credited with eradicating smallpox and now a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, spoke about his experiences fighting epidemics.

In his speech, titled "Battles against epidemic disease: from India to the White House," he offered a rough timeline of his life and accomplishments, along with anecdotes and advice for the future of public health.

Henderson and his family lived in southern Ontario as Calvinist Presbyterians. His upbringing emphasized education and public service. He attended Oberlin College from 1946-50, where he started up a radio station at the college with his roommate. He viewed it as the first opportunities to "take talented people and create something exciting and new."

He attended Rochester Medical School from 1950-54, and he was interested in combining medicine and management. He did his medical residency at Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown, N.Y., where the first organ transplant took place.

Somehow "I wound up as the infectious disease expert on bone marrow transplant [there]," he said with some confusion.

Henderson had intended to be a cardiologist and did not initially have an interest in pursuing infectious diseases. He readily dismissed pediatrics: "The rashes never looked like they did in the textbooks."

He gained a new interest in infectious diseases and wrote a thesis for a prize in History of Medicine on the historical epidemiology of cholera in New York during the 1830s. He went to Atlanta as assistant to the chief of the Epidemiologic Intelligence Service.

Together with Alex Langmuir, he set up a five year training program at the CDC to keep senior public health officials around, instead of having them leave after two years. Only 75 percent of officials stayed interested and involved in the field upon leaving. He himself applied to this program, and spent 1957 - 1959 as an internal medicine resident.

Henderson spent one year at Hopkins getting a Masters of Public Health in Epidemiology, recognizing that this would be of increasing important in the years to come.

He then served as director of surveillance from 1960 - 1965. Around this time, a smallpox unit was formed in response to the many cases being brought into European countries by immigrants from India and Pakistan. The question he had to ask was, "We're going to get an importation of smallpox -- will we be able to handle it?"

Henderson was almost forcibly sent to Geneva for a commitment of 18 months to oversee and coordinate the program. His title then was director of the World Health Organization's global smallpox eradication campaign. The project was given a 10 year timetable for the eradication; it ran over by nine months and 26 days by the time the last smallpox case was over. "The most feared of all pestilences ... and we had seen the last case."

Hopkins offered him a deanship at the School of Public Health. He initially refused, and his wife was not thrilled with the move from Boston to Baltimore: "Over my dead body," she purportedly said. In 1977, he became the dean of the faculty of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and served there until 1990.

Henderson then served as associate director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy for former President George H.W. Bush. He recalled how unusual the request was: "First of all, I'm a registered Democrat -- I feel you should know that -- and my wife is [a member] of Planned Parenthood in Maryland."

From 1995 to 2001, Henderson focused his attention on biological weapons, calling the use of them "a repugnant subject to public health and medicine." The Department of Justice and the Department of Defense had assumed responsibility for dealing with the threat of bioterrorism, but there was no presence of medicine in the field. In response, Henderson acted as founding director of the Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies.

He also set up the Office of Public Health Emergency Preparedness at the request of Surgeon General Tommy Thompson, which would receive an influx of $3 billion in the aftermath of Sept. 11. He called that "one of the most traumatic periods in my career."

Henderson summarized the length of his career as "voyages into the unknown ... to go and to do what never has been done before. It's a challenge, but there's nothing more exciting than that." He also emphasized that opportunism is key; goals must be seen in a broad definition. "Every public health program we have could be improved," he said.