ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the great men of America who have influenced the course of public health history: Hermann M. Biggs, William T. Sedgwick, and Charles V. Chapin. At the Lawrence experimental station of the Massachusetts State Board of Health, Sedgwick and his colleagues, did work of great national value. A roster of Sedgwick's pupils would include many of America's leaders in public health and sanitation. Chapin's book on the Sources and Modes of Infection rushed aside the current beliefs on aerial convection of infection and the exaggerated belief in the influence of intermediate things in spreading infection, and thus helped to make efforts to control the spread of disease more exact and less wasteful. Chapin was emphatic in deprecating the survival of the crude generalisation that dirt makes disease. There was force in his objection to this undiscriminating statement, notwithstanding its having been the slogan crystallising in words the aim of earlier British sanitary improvements.
