Yale School of Public Health - History

History

Founded in 1915, Yale’s School of Public Health is one of the oldest of the nationally accredited schools of public health. It began when, in 1914, the University received an endowment from the Anna M.R. Lauder family to establish a chair in public health at the Yale Medical School. This chair was filled a year later by Charles-Edward Amory Winslow, who was and is still considered to be the “founder of public health” at Yale.

In its early years, Winslow’s Department of Public Health at Yale was a catalyst for public health reform in Connecticut, and the health surveys prepared by him and his faculty and students led to considerable improvements in public health organization. He also successfully campaigned to improve health laws in Connecticut, as well as for the passage of a bill that created the State Department of Public Health. Drawing on principles and expertise in existing departments at the School of Medicine to supplement public health courses, Winslow focused on educating undergraduate medical students in the context of preventive medicine. He established a one–year program leading to a Certificate in Public Health and a comprehensive non–medical program that graduated eighteen students with a Certificate in Public Health, ten with a Ph.D., and four with a Dr.P.H. by 1925. His students specialized in administration, bacteriology, or statistics. Due to three decades of Winslow’s leadership and innovative foresight and commitment to interdisciplinary education, the department’s academic programs earned recognition as a nationally accredited School of Public Health in 1946.

In 1946, the Yale School of Public Health received its inaugural status as an accredited "school of public health." Because of this accreditation, Yale is in a unique situation of assuming the identities of both a department of the Yale School of Medicine and an autonomous school of public health. In the 1960s the Yale Department of Public Health merged with the Section of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, a unit within the Department of Internal Medicine at the Medical School, resulting in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health (EPH). In 1964, EPH moved into its own building, the Laboratory of Epidemiology and Public Health (LEPH), which was designed by Philip Johnson and continues as the primary location for teaching and research.