Carnegie’s first public donation establishes first US laboratory – precedent for “community public health”

Sometime in 1884 Andrew Carnegie makes his first public donation in the amount of $50,000, to Bellevue Medical College in New York, the funding is to establish the Carnegie Laboratory which is America’s “first laboratory for teaching and investigation of bacteriology and pathology.” [1]

“The directors are Dr. Edward G. Janeway, who becomes a NYC health commissioner, and Dr. Frederick S. Dennis, who reports on the first investigations carried out at the laboratory on the action of micro-organisms on surgical wounds.”

Five years later in 1889, Bellevue hospital “physicians, Dr. Hermann Michael Biggs and Dr. Alfred Loomis, are the first to report that tuberculosis is a preventable disease. Dr. Biggs, the first crusader for community public health, writes that ‘no duty of society, acting through its government, is paramount to the obligation to attack the removable cause of disease.’ Dr. Biggs originates the first bacteriological laboratory in the US at Bellevue.” and develops bacteriological diagnostic techniques.  In 1914 he becomes the NY State Medical Officer.