Kerr Lachlan White, 1917-2014

Several distinguished epidemiologists have died in recent weeks. Among them was my mentor and friend Kerr White. Responding to the past president of the International Epidemiological Association, I wrote the following memorial note for the IEA Newsletter (lightly edited here):

Kerr L White, MD, IEA President 1974-77, died July 22 2014, at Westminster Canterbury of the Blue Ridge, Virginia, USA.  Kerr White was born in Winnipeg, brought up in Ottawa, and educated in economics and medicine at McGill University in Montreal. He did graduate studies in economics at Yale University and in epidemiology and biostatistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. After a residency in internal medicine at Hitchcock Clinic, Dartmouth, New Hampshire and the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, he worked for 10 years in the department of medicine at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he conducted research on primary medical care. For over fifty years he remained involved in health services research, investigating problems of organizing, managing, financing and evaluating health services in the USA and other countries. Application of epidemiological and statistical methods to problems of health services, with emphasis on social and emotional factors in health, sickness and medical care, were preoccupations throughout his professional life. As director of health sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation, he founded the training program in clinical epidemiology that became known as the International Clinical Epidemiology Network, INCLEN for short. Initially this had five sites in USA, Canada and Australia; now there are clinical epidemiology training programs and clinical research units in more than 80 medical schools in more than 33 countries. Kerr White was a leader of thinking about health policy and practice throughout the world.  He served on many influential committees and governing boards, including the visiting committee of the Harvard School of Public Health, the technical board of the Milbank Memorial Fund, the advisory committee on population health of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science. He wrote or edited important books on health care, health policy and health statistics and gathered an impressive personal collection which is now held at the University of Virginia and accessible on line.

In 1964, responding to his invitation, I left Australia with my family and joined his research team at the University of Vermont. Kerr White had an impressive appearance, tall, handsome. Speaking quietly and courteously but firmly, in clearly articulated sentences he could sum up succinctly essential points that had emerged in prior discussion, no matter how disorganized and incoherent some speakers may have been.

In 1980 as one of his first acts at the Rockefeller Foundation and one of his last as past president of the IEA, he released funds to compile a Dictionary of Epidemiology sponsored by the IEA. He asked me to edit this dictionary and gave me much help and encouragement in its early development. He provided funds for a five-day meeting at the Rockefeller Foundation’s head offices in New York, attended by most of those whose names appear on the title page of the first edition of the Dictionary. At that meeting we thrashed out and reached agreement on wording of definitions of the most important concepts and methods in epidemiology.

 He was my mentor and my friend, to whom I owe a great deal. I miss him and mourn his loss.