Samuel Warren Abbott

Samuel Warren Abbott (born June 12, 1837 in Woburn , Massachusetts , † October 22, 1904 in Newton Center , Massachusetts) was an American doctor and statistician . During the last decades of the 19th century, his longstanding successful leadership of the Massachusetts Department of Health and significant analysis of population statistics made significant contributions to the improvement of public health in the United States.

Life

Samuel Warren Abbott was a son of Captain Samuel Abbott and Ruth Winn. He attended Phillips Academy and Brown University , then began studying medicine and graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1862 . He then served during the Civil War for two years as an assistant surgeon in the Navy of the Union states and from 1864 in the same position in the Union Army , where he was first with the First Massachusetts Cavalry . During a temporary leave of absence from military service, he married Martha W. Sullivan, also from Woburn, in 1864; from this marriage had four children.

Abbott opened a doctor's office in Woburn after the end of the Civil War. In 1869 he moved to Wakefield . Three years later, he became coroner of Middlesex County , advocating the need to graduate from medical school in order to pursue this profession. A law passed in 1877 meant that unnatural deaths were no longer investigated by a coroner, but by a forensic doctor, which Abbott held in Middlesex County from 1877 to 1884.

Interested in preventive medicine and solving public health problems, Abbott contributed significantly to the founding of the Massachusetts Department of Health in 1869 and oversaw the state's efforts to improve the health system from 1882–1886. Perhaps the first physician in Massachusetts to develop reputable standards for the production of an uncontaminated and effective vaccine against smallpox , he published the study Uses and Abuses of Animal Vaccination in the Public Health Papers and Reports (1882, vol. 8). In 1886 he was appointed secretary of the Massachusetts Department of Health, which post he held for the rest of his life. In doing so, he made this institution the most successful of its kind in the United States.

Influenced by the work of the British epidemiologist William Farr , one of the founders of health statistics, Abbott also used demographic methods in his work in the health sector. In the 1880s he carried out statistical analyzes on diseases such as leprosy , cholera , influenza and diphtheria . In 1891 he developed a profile of the geographic distribution of certain causes of death in Massachusetts. The annual Report to the Legislature of Massachusetts Relating to the Registry and Return of Births, Marriages, and Deaths (1887–1891) and his work A Summary of the Vital Statistics of the New England States for the Year 1892 (1895) served as a model for future such studies. In 1900 he published his most famous work, Past and Present Condition of Public Hygiene and State Medicine in the United States , which first represented the history of the US health care system.

Two years after moving to Newton Center, Massachusetts, Abbott died in that town on October 22, 1904, at the age of 67.

literature

• Charles W. Carey, Jr .: Abbott, Jacob. In: American National Biography . Volume 1. 1999, p. 32f.