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This chapter describes how the establishment of Yale's Department of Public Health resulted from the creation of the Anna R. Lauder Chair of Public Health with a gift of $500,000 from the Lauder bequest in 1915. George Blumer had chaired a university committee soon after his arrival in 1906 to consider establishing a department or school to provide education in working with public-health bureaus and philanthropic or charitable organizations. Much of the impetus for the committee had come from Irving Fisher, a political economist at Yale, who was interested in the economic impact of disease on society. He felt that Yale was well positioned to serve the public-health movement, given the combined interests of the medical school, the Sheffield Scientific School, and the Department of Economics.

This chapter focuses on the deanship of Vernon W. Lippard, a Massachusetts native who had taken the five-year combined medical course in the Sheffield Scientific School, receiving his M.D. degree cum laude in 1929. One of five students elected to membership in the medical honor society, Alpha Omega Alpha, he was also awarded the Parker Prize, given annually to the graduating student “who has shown the best qualifications for a successful practitioner.” During his final year, the first issue of the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine was published, and it contained two abstracts, based on articles by faculty members, signed “V.W.L.” After graduating, Lippard remained in New Haven for an internship in pediatrics with Grover Powers at the New Haven Hospital. He then went to Cornell for residency training and was the first chief resident when the Cornell Department of Pediatrics moved to the newly completed New York Hospital in 1932.

New Haven, Connecticut, where the Yale campus stretched its ivy-hung halls, was a far larger, busier, less countrified place than Lawrenceville. The Yale Forest School granted only graduate degrees, so Aldo enrolled in the Sheffield Scientific School on the Yale campus for his undergraduate studies. The college offered students a program of preparatory courses for the Forest School: physics, chemistry, German, mechanical drawing, and analytical geometry. In a room at 400 Temple Street, Aldo set up a lifestyle as frugal and selfreliant as he had in Lawrenceville. He stayed loyal to his plan for studying, working out in the gymnasium, and running cross-country track, while attending a variety of special lectures and expanding his reading list. In his reading as in his running, he covered great distances in a short time. He read Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter by Theodore Roosevelt alongside the Bible; books on forestry accompanied the works of Longfellow, Emerson, Thoreau, Cicero, and others. A tome inspiring “much interest and surprise” was Charles Darwin’s Vegetable Mould and Earthworms. (A year or so earlier, he had read A Naturalist’s Voyage Around the World and proclaimed it “very instructive.”) Aldo had far less time for tramping now. The countryside was farther away, and his four-to seven–a–week treks dwindled to one or two. Though he enjoyed the outings just as much, they were becoming a hobby rather than a way of life. His courses were more challenging, and he was beguiled by Ivy League activities and a new group of friends. Descriptions of football games and college parties began to fill his letters. He even let his sister Marie arrange a Christmastime schedule of dances and social engagements for him in Burlington, and then surprised himself by enjoying it all. Women, many of them Marie’s friends, had entered his domain of interest with a flourish, and his dancing lessons finally proved useful. Ham, from Lawrenceville, teased Aldo for his new fancies: “You have decayed into what I used to be— the lover with his ballad, the devoted sweetheart; the passionate letter–writer. Ah me!”