Harrison J. Alter - Social Emergency Medicine: Principles and Practice

I know what Rudolf Virchow (18211902) meant when he told his father: I am no longer a partial man but a whole one in that my medical creed merges with my political and social creeds.

I understood the lack of worker safety and food quality of the Chicago meat industry that Upton Sinclair (18781968) described in The Jungle.

My eyes were opened by Rachel Carsons (19071964) concerns for protecting the environment in the Silent Spring. She taught us that whatever we do can affect every other human, animal, and plant through destruction of the quality of our air, water, and land.

I appreciated the transformative thoughts of Gregory Pincus (19031967) as he discussed how his creation of the oral contraceptive would give women the right to control when they would become pregnant.

I worked with Norman Pirie (19071997), a British biochemist who led an international team creating leaf protein for human consumption in an attempt to end kwashiorkor and marasmus.

In the New Yorker, I read Berton Rouechs (19101994) monthly column The Annals of Medicine where he described people whose new diseases were treated by creative scientists and activist physicians.

I read William Haddons (19261985) papers on the role of an epidemiologist in searching for the factors that cause injury in the United States and the world. I learned to believe that his epidemiologic triad of the host, the agent, and the environment could be employed to investigate any problem I wished to address in emergency medicine.

We all began to appreciate the remarkable civil rights advances led by Martin Luther King, Jr. (19291968) and the astounding health rights potential of the enactment of Medicaid (1965) and Medicare (1965) legislation.