Milton Terris (1915-2002): Outspoken Advocate for Progressive Public Health Policy

THIS EXCERPT FROM MILTON Terris' presidential address to the American Public Health Association (APHA) in October 1967 beautifully captures the spirit of the man and the wide range of his achievements in several different fields: epidemiology, social analysis, health policy, and political advocacy. His speech begins with a sharp critique of the false dichotomy between the environmental orientation of the “old” public health and the behavioral approach of the “new” public health. Iconoclastically, Terris asserts that this dichotomy fails to hold and strongly affirms the societal grounding of all public health problems. Terris targets cigarette smoking as an exemplary modern public health issue, noting pointedly that attempts to modify smoking behavior by education directed at individual smokers produce limited progress—as long as society fails to ban cigarette advertising or address the economics of the tobacco industry.

Terris then goes on to draw trenchant comparisons to the alcohol and food industries, again underscoring the false separation of individual behavior from social context. Finally, Terris turns to health and social policy, calling strongly for a national program of health care modeled on Medicare, social policy aimed at the eradication of poverty and racial discrimination, and the readjustment of national budgetary priorities to downplay military spending and upgrade investments in health, education, housing, and community development programs.

Terris' career followed a similar arc, from epidemiology to policy and advocacy. He graduated from Columbia College in 1935 and the New York University College of Medicine in 1939, then interned at Harlem and Bellevue hospitals and served as a New York State apprentice in epidemiology.¹ He received his master's in public health from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in 1944. He served as an associate professor of preventive medicine at the SUNY Buffalo School of Medicine from 1951 to 1957 and as a professor of epidemiology at the Tulane University School of Medicine from 1958 to 1960. From 1960 to 1963 he headed the Chronic Disease Unit of the Department of Epidemiology in New York City's Public Health Research Institute. In 1964 he moved to New York Medical College and served as a professor of preventive medicine and chair of the department until his retirement and move to Vermont in 1980.

When Terris retired from teaching and administration, he devoted himself to founding a new organization, the National Association for Public Health Policy and its journal, the Journal of Public Health Policy, which he edited from 1980 until 2002.² Throughout his career, Terris was always an active and dedicated member of APHA: he served as secretary of APHA's Medical Care Section from 1948 to 1952, a member of the section's council from 1952 to 1959, a member of the APHA Executive Board from 1958 to 1964, and president in 1966 and 1967. Terris was also president of the Association of Teachers of Preventive Medicine, recipient of the Physician Forum's Edward Barsky Award, and cofounder of Vermont Consumers Campaign for Health. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Montreal late in his life and, after his death in 2002, garnered special recognition from the General Assembly of the State of Vermont.