As I Recall It

The following year (1952), after Emerson had presented his account, Dr. God-frey's story of the beginnings of the AES were set forth before the Society. It was quite different, almost, in fact-a rebuttal. Even in the early 1920s, as an active health official, Godfrey had begun a crusade to convince public health workers around the country of the value of accurate, quantitative reporting of diseases, and of the importance of biostatistics. He felt that what was needed was "something akin to ecology and bionomics as a methodology, if not a science." It was his view that such a discipline should be regarded as one of the medical sciences. In his early efforts to forward these ideas he looked to the American Public Health Association. Of one thing he was sure, that the Biggs Club cannot be considered, "as the ovum from which this Society was hatched." Rather, it was Godfrey's belief that the AES came into being because the proper season had arrived. "The soil, I think, was there and only needed planting." And yet after some 5 or 6 years of effort on Godfrey's part, it was only when he had at last managed to get Dr. Emerson's ear that his idea of forming a "select society" of the looked for academic stature and devoted to discussion of epidemiology, was realized. The great epidemics incident to, or concurrent with, World War I aroused and intensified the interest in epidemiology of many workers in the fields of public health and medicine. The disruptive effects of outbreaks of mumps, measles, meningitis , primary and secondary pneumonia, among recruits in our Army and Navy training camps were but curtain raisers for the devastating pandemic of influenza of 1918-19. The latter as observed in the United States was different in its behavior from preceding epidemic and pandemic occurrences. It was remarkable for the promptness and severity of the secondary pneumonia and the predilection of complications for those in the prime of life; the high fatality rate among these made it remarkable. It was also remarkable for its great variability in severity both as it occurred "'As I recall it. The background and beginning of the American Epidemiological Society," All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.