Schools

Rollins School of Public Health

Emory's interest in public health goes back at least to the decision to merge the Atlanta Medical College into the new university formed in 1915. As early as 1892, the precursors of Emory Medical School were providing medical care to the indigent population of Atlanta through Grady Memorial Hospital, where Emory faculty have been training medical students and residents for more than eight decades.

But the advent of a program focused specifically on "public health," as the discipline had come to be known by the early part of the twentieth century, can be traced more accurately to the 1930s and developments in rural Georgia. In a sense, Robert Woodruff laid the foundation for a public health presence at Emory when he enlisted the aid of Emory doctors and scientists in setting up a malaria research center and treatment clinic at Ichauway Plantation, in Baker County, Georgia. The United States Public Health Service itself did not establish an Atlanta office until 1946, but it did so that year in part because of malaria-control experiments performed during the previous decade in Smithville, Georgia. The hot, humid, mosquito-infested state—along with its large military presence—made Georgia a logical choice of the federal government for such work. In time this work grew into the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In 1958 Woodruff bought land next to the Emory campus and gave it to the University to donate to the federal government for housing the CDC next door to the University. It happened that a close political friend occupied the White House at the time: Woodruff had come to know Dwight Eisenhower during World War II, when the Coca-Cola president made it possible for the general's troops—and all American troops—to find a Coke within an arm's reach for just a nickel. Over golf one day, Woodruff enlisted Eisenhower's aid in moving the CDC from downtown to Emory, and the Emory University School of Medicine began a close partnership with the CDC.

Through the 1960s and 1970s the School of Medicine drew heavily on the nearby CDC to recruit adjunct faculty for the school's burgeoning Department of Preventive Medicine and Community Health. By the early seventies, as vaccination and containment programs began to eliminate such scourges as smallpox and polio, preventive medicine was becoming politically more fashionable, and the impetus grew for Emory to do more with the resources available in the city. Attempting to distinguish Emory's program from those at schools of public health around the country, which were perceived as highly academic and somewhat isolated from practice, the medical school focused its curriculum on the master of community health degree. The first students were admitted in the summer of 1975. With a small enrollment catering to midcareer professionals, the program expanded its curriculum by offering additional courses at Morehouse College, Georgia Tech, Agnes Scott College, Georgia State, and other schools at Emory. With only six graduates its first year, the program remained small and ran at a deficit through the 1970s.

The situation began to change with the arrival of Eugene Gangarosa, M.D., M.P.H., in 1982 from the American University of Beirut. Gangarosa had retired from the United States Public Health Service in 1978 and had then spent three years building a respectable program in Beirut. But the civil war in Lebanon forced him to flee. Accepting a part-time position in the Department of Community Health, Gangarosa recruited adjunct faculty from the CDC and increased fourfold the number of courses offered. Within two years the program was in the black for the first time.   

Elevated to division status within the medical school in the late 1980s, public health expanded into space leased from the new American Cancer Society headquarters on Clifton Road. With growing support from the leadership of the Woodruff Health Sciences Center and the University administration, the division became the School of Public Health in October 1990—the first new school at Emory since the dental school merged with the University in 1944. Not coincidentally, the closing of the dental school in 1990, owing in part to the region's diminishing need for training dentists, enabled the University to underwrite the new school of public health, which was viewed as filling a void. Quickly enrollment skyrocketed, and within five years the school had moved into its new home, the Grace Crum Rollins Building. The Rollins School of Public Health was named to honor the family that gave generously to make the new building possible.

Source:  Hauk, Gary S.  A Legacy of Heart and Mind:  Emory Since 1836.