When we lived in Burlington, Vermont, in 1964-65, I joined
the Washington-based Association of Teachers of Preventive Medicine (ATPM). I
retained my membership throughout the following 5 years that we spent in Edinburgh,
as an easy way to keep abreast of academic preventive medicine and public health
in the USA. In 1971-72, I was elected president of the Canadian Association of
Teachers of Preventive and Social Medicine (CATSPM). One of my duties was to
represent CATSPM on the board of directors of ATPM, a pleasant duty that,
because I was a bona fide member of ATPM, rapidly translated into active
participation in ATPM’s affairs. Among
other things I was coopted to ATPM’s committee on publications. This committee
soon acquired a most important task. In 1975, Sid Shindell was president of
ATPM and it fell to him to discuss with the CEO of Appleton’s, a great American
publishing house, the future of the bulky reference textbook of preventive
medicine that had first been published in 1913, edited and largely written by
Milton Rosenau who had been based at the Harvard School of Public Health. He
was succeeded by Kenneth Maxcy whose base was the Johns Hopkins School of
Hygiene and Public Health. Maxcy was followed as editor of this large textbook
by Philip Sartwell, an eminent epidemiologist, one of the men who interviewed
me when there was talk of me accompanying Kerr White on his move from
Burlington to Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore.
Phil Sartwell’s main contribution to the bulky reference textbook may have been
to change its name: it became Preventive
Medicine and Hygiene, but it was better known by its eponym, Maxcy-Rosenau.
In other respects the book was a failure under Phil Sartwell’s editorial
leadership. It sold barely enough copies to cover production costs. Sid
Shindell, ATPM president at that time, advised Appleton’s CEO that the centre
of gravity of the discipline had shifted from schools of public health to
medical school departments of preventive medicine, and proposed that ATPM
should be charged with the task of identifying the next editor, as well as most
if not all the contributors. I was coopted to the selection committee, because
of my recent experience as editor of the ‘community medicine’ section of the
multi-volume Edinburgh textbook, A
Companion to Medical Studies, and was able to demonstrate to other members
of the selection committee that I understood the role, function, and
responsibilities of the editor of a multi-author reference textbook, and that I
had a comprehensive vision of contemporary public health sciences and practice.
There were 3 credible candidates for the post as editor in
chief of Maxcy-Rosenau. Two were getting on in years and would probably be good
for only one edition; one of these had a reputation for irascibility and
inability to work amicably with others, the other was known to be a rather
dreamy person; his acquaintance with public health and preventive medicine was philosophical
and theoretical, untainted by practical experience. The third candidate was
more than a generation younger; he had edited several previous books, but had
turned these into vehicles for his own ideas, rather than a platform for authoritative
ideas of authors of other chapters. The selection committee decided to defer a
decision for a few weeks, during which each of us would seek other possible
candidates. There the matter rested from
the autumn of 1976 until February 1977. On a February day soon after our
wedding anniversary I had a phone call from Steve Jonas, chairman of the search
committee that was seeking a suitable candidate to edit the 11th
edition of the Maxcy-Rosenau textbook. Steve told me that he and other members
of the search committee (Bob Berg, Sid Shindell, and Doug Scutchfield) had talked
informally during a meeting they’d all attended, and had concluded that I would
be a suitable candidate, on the basis of my track record, my vision of what the
book needed, my reputation for getting things done, my writing skills, and the
fact that I was due for a full salary sabbatical leave. An additional factor in
my favour was that, thanks to my service on the NIH study section, I had a wide
acquaintance network that included many of the elite leaders of epidemiology
and other public health sciences in the USA. I was on first-name terms with
many of them. As chairman of the search committee, Steve invited me to take the
position of editor in chief of Maxcy-Rosenau
Preventive Medicine and Hygiene. I
declined emphatically. It seemed absurd to me that this quintessentially
American reference textbook could be edited by someone who wasn’t American,
didn’t even live in the USA. Steve Jonas deployed his persuasive powers to
convince me to change my mind. After a great deal of thought, discussion with
the dean of the Ottawa medical school, and talking it over at length with
Wendy, I reluctantly and with many misgivings, agreed to accept the invitation.
Having agreed to take on this mammoth task I faced several
daunting challenges. I needed associate editors for two large and very
important sections, communicable disease control, and environmental and
occupational health. I needed to meet
and get to know the Appleton’s editor with whom I would work; I needed to
decide how much writing to do myself, and needed to identify top quality
authorities to write all the other chapters. This was a particularly important
part of the planning: with such a large, encyclopaediac reference textbook,
each author had to produce, or be given, an outline of the subject matter to be
covered in the chapter(s) he or she would write; I as the editor had to be
vigilant to detect errors of omission and commission, overlaps, duplication and contradictions
when two or more authors were writing about the same or similar material. I also wanted to produce a book distinguished
by clarity, conciseness, readability, as well as having a sharp focus on the
cutting edges of the discipline. Appleton’s
had a distinguished record as publishers of many eminent works including
Osler’s textbook of medicine, the American editions of the works of Charles
Darwin, and many other famous textbooks and monographs. I had a moral
obligation to maintain this standard of excellence. For this reason I rewrote quite a large part of the book when chapter authors lacked adequate writing skills. When all the important editorial decisions had been made, Wendy and I had to decide whether to rent or sell our home on Island Park Drive during our year away from Ottawa, what to do
about Jonathan’s schooling, and where to spend my sabbatical year.
The long list of potential bases for the sabbatical year
included Boston, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Rochester
NY, and quickly narrowed down to New York and UCLA, Los Angeles. Before the challenge of editing Maxcy-Rosenau
arose I’d discussed with Lester Breslow and others at UCLA the possibility of
spending my sabbatical year with them. I
immediately saw risks of conflicts of interest if I were based in a school of
public health; and on the contrary, several advantages of a New York base –
apart from the cultural attraction of the Big Apple which assuredly is worth a
year or more of anybody’s life. I’ll have more to say about this in another
post.
On Bastille Day (July 14) 1977 I met my Appleton’s editor, Rich
Lampert, in New York; it was a stifling hot steamy day and a massive power
outage had closed the city’s offices and restaurants. Rich and I conferred on a bench in the little
park behind the New York Public Library on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 42nd
Street, ate street food from a barrow and toasted the book’s success in luke
warm Coca Cola. Over the next 3 years, Rich and I became firm friends. On that
day I reported my progress so far: I had recruited Jim Chin as associate editor
of the communicable diseases section of the book, and Irving Selikoff for
environmental and occupational diseases. I had recruited eminent authorities to
write several chapters and was in discussions with others; all so far were
people with whom I was on first-name terms, through the NIH Epidemiology and
Disease Control Study Section, and was conferring with the ATPM steering
committee about others. Rich Lampert agreed with me that I’d got off to a very
good start.
I decided to change the name of the book to Public Health and Preventive Medicine,
and gave my reasons for this change in the Preface and in a short introductory
chapter on the conceptual and philosophical foundations of public health.
Most aspects of my editorial work proceeded smoothly. There
were only 2 failures. I could not identify anyone to write on the economics,
costs and benefits of public health programs and services. One author produced
a text that would have been barely adequate as an article in the magazine
section of a Sunday newspaper. I ghost wrote a substitute chapter. About half
the chapters were poorly written, and I did a great deal of rewriting, for
which most authors were grateful. There
were a few laggards. When the production schedule was threatened by the failure
of the final laggard to deliver, I visited him in his office, confronted him and
sat there until he gave me what he had written so far; I ghost-wrote the
remainder. The book, which weighed in at just under 2000 pages, was published
in October 1979, in time for the annual meeting of the American Public Health
Association, where it sold briskly.
Reviewers and – more important – users praised the book, and
Appleton’s were well satisfied with sales. All of us breathed a collective sigh
of relief. There was very little
respite. Within two years I had begun to plan the 12th edition,
which was published in 1986. It was even
more massive than the 11th edition. It had 1958 pages, compared with 1928 pages, but they were larger pages,
smaller fonts and tighter design – almost 1000 words per page compared with
about 750 words per page in the 11th edition. There was another
subtle difference: whereas I was on first-name terms with almost all the
authors of the 11th edition, I personally knew only about ¾ of the
authors of the 12th edition. Moreover, I knew that I had a less
comprehensive grasp of the entire domain of public health sciences and practice
than I’d had when I started work on the 11th edition. I decided to
invite Bob Wallace at the University of Iowa to join me as co-editor of the 13th
edition, with a view to taking over as editor in chief after me. It was a wise decision to quit while I was
ahead. The publishers recognized this too, and paid me the compliment of adding
my name to the eponym: the book is now known as Maxcy-Rosenau-Last. It has gone through two more editions, in
which I am identified as editor emeritus, and in which I have written or
co-authored chapters. The 15th edition was published in 2006.
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| The 5 editions of Maxcy-etc with which I've been associated are on the left of this photo, level with my upper arm. |
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