Rockefeller Archive Center

Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports are created by recipients of research travel stipends and by many others who have conducted research at the RAC. The reports demonstrate the breadth of the RAC's archival holdings, particularly in the study of philanthropy and its effects. Read more about the history of philanthropy at resource.rockarch.org. Also, see the RAC Bibliography of Scholarship, a comprehensive online database of publications citing RAC archival collections.

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From a Clinical to a Public Health Problem: The Control of Tuberculosis in Jamaica, c. 1918-1982

January 1, 2013

Since the publication of Randal Packard's White Plague, Black Labor in 1989 which examined the control of tuberculosis (TB) in South Africa, the focus of the historical scholarship on TB has gradually moved away from Europe and North America. While much work has been done in recent years on the history of TB in Latin America, the control and treatment of the disease in the British Caribbean has thus far been largely neglected. In July 2012, funded by a grant from the University of York's Centre for Chronic Diseases and Disorders, I undertook a pilot project on TB in the British Caribbean from the early twentieth century until the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s that focused on three parts of the region that differed considerably in terms of size, economy and racial make-up: Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad. I spent a week on each island, visiting their national archives and libraries and also examining papers relating to TB in the Caribbean in the National Archives and the Wellcome Library in London and in the WHO archives in Geneva.

The Jamaica Hookworm Commission (1918-1920)

January 1, 2012

In his final days as the Director of the Hookworm Commission in Jamaica, Dr. P.E. Gardner wrote to his superior Hector Howard about his experience in setting up the first public health demonstration campaign on the island. He lamented, " it has seemed to me at times that my best efforts had produced very poor results ... It was not a satisfactory piece of work to me and at the same time it was the most difficult piece of work I have ever done." Gardner was the second official from the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health (IHB) to take up work on the island since the arrival of the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) in 1918. He shared the pessimism of his predecessor Dr. M.E. Connor, who held out little hope that the efforts of IHB in Jamaica would bear any fruit.

Jamaica Advancing: The Rockefeller Tuberculosis Commission and the Tensions Between Research and Eradication

January 1, 2010

The Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Board (IHB) first arrived in Jamaica in 1918 as part of an expansion of its work on hookworm in the American South, the British Caribbean and Central America. Using the methods perfected in British Guiana, Trinidad and Costa Rica of survey, education and mass treatment, known as the "American" or "Intensive Method", the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) was able to gain the support of both the colonial and local governments in Jamaica. It soon expanded its work into many other fields of public health and education. By 1928 International Health Division, under the direction of Dr. Benjamin Washburn, had created the Hookworm and Malaria Commissions, established a training school for sanitary inspectors, organized local health boards in each parish with trained medical personnel and instituted programs of nutrition and dental care in local schools. In addition the Bureau of Health Education, under the direction of Washburn, published the popular Public Health Bulletin to spread the message of sanitation to the masses.

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