History
Infectious diseases, tropical medicine and public health have had
a long and distinguished history at the NYU-Bellevue Medical Center.
Indeed, Bellevue Hospital was established to treat the growing number of patients
infected with two arthropod-borne diseases: yellow fever and typhus. Graduates
of our medical school have ranged from Walter Reed and William Crawford Gorgas (conquerors of yellow fever), to Albert Sabin and Jonas Salk (conquerors of polio).
Our predecessor department (Preventive Medicine) was formed with Hermann M. Biggs
as Chair. Dr. Biggs had been appointed as an Instructor within the
Carnegie Laboratory in 1884. The Carnegie Building and laboratory
(built on 26th Street adjacent to the old Bellevue Medical School
building, which still stands) was the first bacteriology laboratory to
be organized in the United States. The laboratory was formed as a
consequence of the bacteriological revolution of Pasteur and Koch, which swept through Europe throughout the 1880s. Dr. Biggs was one of
the seminal figures in public health in the United States, being
responsible for the establishment of the first municipal Board of
Health laboratory in the United States (in New York City), and for the
establishment of model programs to control tuberculosis, diphtheria
and venereal diseases.
The Hermann M. Biggs Chair was held by the Chairs of our predecessor department
for many years. More recently, this named Chair was transferred from our Department
to the Department of Pathology, where it is now held by Professor Victor Nussenzweig.
Dr. Biggs was followed as Chair by Henry Meleney and then Harry Most. In
1947, the Department was subdivided, with the Department of Environmental
Medicine splitting off and moving to Sterling Forest. In 1974, the Department
of Preventive Medicine, which was by then devoted entirely to parasitic
diseases, became reconstituted as the Division of Parasitology within the
Department of Microbiology, with Milton Salton as Chair and Ruth Nussenzweig
as the Head of the Division. The Division became a full-fledged Department
in July 1984, with Dr. Ruth
Nussenzweig as its first Chair. This Department (Medical Parasitology) was created by the Board of Trustees of New York University
to acknowledge the stature and global significance of the research being conducted
by a team of internationally recognized scientists. Over a period of years,
research was expanded from a focus on malaria to include the study of Entamoeba, Leishmania,
African and South American Trypanosoma, Pneumocystis, and the molecular biology
of mosquito vectors of disease.
After more than 25 years of leadership, Dr. Nussenzweig stepped down in January
2002 to return to full-time research. She was replaced by Dr. Jerome
Vanderberg, who served as interim Chair until the end of 2003. Dr.
Karen Day was then appointed in 2004 both as the Chair of the Department and as
the Director of the School of Medicine’s Institute of Urban and Global
Health. The Chair brings strength in malaria, transmission biology and epidemiology.
