ABSTRACT
Smith continued his public push against eugenics and helped Charles Bernstein establish the Rome Plan for mentally disabled persons. He published Who Is Insane? in 1916, which gave the story of his lunacy commissioner work and his views on treatment but was largely ignored. He urged the APHA in 1915 and again in 1921 to fight for legislation to raise the Public Health Service to a cabinet position. Medical professionals, historians, and newspaper writers rushed to honor him from different perspectives. Nicholas Murray Butler bestowed Columbia’s honorary Doctor of Science Degree on Smith on June 7, 1922. Smith died eleven weeks later, six months short of his one-hundredth birthday. Some obituaries praised his lifetime of public service, others his graceful aging, and a few simply noted that he planned to live one hundred years but failed. The only monument to him, other than a gravestone, is the name “Smith,” along with twenty-eight other last names, such as “Pasteur,” carved above the seventh floor of the New York City Health Building at 125 Worth Street.
