ABSTRACT
Smith continued his surgical work and drifted away from the politically combative National Board of Health. He accepted a volunteer position on the New York State Board of Charities in 1881, which oversaw insanity care. Smith worked with another Charities commissioner, Josephine Shaw Lowell, who was interested in insanity problems and, nine months after joining the Board, Governor Cornell named him the State Commissioner in Lunacy. Smith helped the National Board of Health set up a smallpox control program in 1882, but he was busy inspecting asylums and poorhouses when the National Board of Health lost most of its funding that year, pushing him further away from public health. He brought his civic energies and public health experience to mental illness care by collecting data and writing about mental illness law. Berlin’s Robert Koch found the bacterial cause of tuberculosis in 1882, bringing credibility to the germ theory and launching public health’s transition into the laboratory.
