What Can Epidemiologists Learn from Historic Heat Waves? The Case of Boston, July 1911

Department of Epidemiology Seminar Series

Speaker:

David S. Jones, M.D., Ph.D.
A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of  Medicine
Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Faculty of  Medicine, Harvard University 

Professor of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Abstract: Epidemiologists (and historians) have learned an enormous amount by studying past outbreaks of infectious disease. Histories of epidemics have been used to calibrate epidemiological models and to understand the ways in which societies will likely respond to future disease outbreaks. Over the past decade, researchers and government officials have become increasingly concerned about climate related threats to public health, including heat waves, droughts, forest fires, and other extreme weather events. Like epidemics, these all have historical precedents. It is possible to examine the history of past climate-health emergencies in search of both epidemiological and historical insight into the nature of these threats. I will demonstrate this approach with an analysis of the heat wave that produced the hottest day in Boston history, July 4, 1911. 

Bio: Trained in psychiatry and history of science, David Jones is the Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine at Harvard University. His research has focused on the causes and meanings of health inequalities (Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600) and the history of decision making in cardiac therapeutics (Broken Hearts: The Tangled History of Cardiac Care). He is currently at work on several other histories, of the evolution of coronary artery surgery, of heart disease and cardiac therapeutics in India, and of the threats of air pollution and global warming to health. His teaching at Harvard College and Harvard Medical School explores the history of medicine, medical ethics, and social medicine.