Elizabeth Fee (1946–2018)

Elizabeth Fee was a remarkable and influential public health historian, whose personal and professional trajectories led her to speak truth to and about power in public health, past and present. Born in Northern Ireland in 1946 to Irish–Methodist missionary parents, Liz’s childhood brought her into contact with peoples and struggles across the globe. At just five weeks of age, she was whisked away by her parents to civil war–era China, where she lost hearing in one ear from an untreated bout with scarlet fever. In midchildhood, she attended school in Malaysia, after which her family returned to Belfast. There, she came of age amid festering political and religious violence, learning firsthand that history is told and retold by protagonists and witnesses, oppressors and oppressed.

Liz in her Bethesda home in 2016 or 2017.

Liz achieved First Class Honors at Cambridge University in biochemistry and in history and philosophy of science, proceeding to earn two master’s degrees and then a doctorate in history of science (1978) from Princeton University, with a dissertation focusing on “Science and the ‘Woman Question,’ 1860–1920” as analyzed through Victorian-era periodicals.¹

From 1974 to 1995, she was a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health (now Bloomberg School), first in health humanities, then international health, and finally health policy. Active in both feminist and health leftist movements, she also became deeply curious about her own institutional base, in 1987 publishing Disease and Discovery: A History of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, 1916–1939.² In this first-ever “biography” of the first-ever school of public health, Liz crafted what might have been a staid institutional history into an engaging and eyebrow-raising account that retraces the powerful forces, figures, and ideologies that shaped the school’s founding and early trajectory. She revisited this theme in later works, illuminating the politics of health training in distinct milieus and demonstrating how power was marshalled in the presumed neutral and technocratic domain of public health education.

Her early interests in feminism, women, and science burgeoned into several notable works on women, gender, and health, including “Women and Health Care: A Comparison of Theories” in the International Journal of Health Services (1975), and the coedited volume (with Nancy Krieger), Women’s Health, Politics, and Power: Essays on Sex/Gender, Medicine, and Public Health (1994).³

(Top) Liz in the 1960s. Location not identified.

(Right) Liz in her Hopkins office, circa 1990s.

Ever attuned to the historical moment, Liz coedited (with Daniel Fox) two pathbreaking volumes on AIDS, as it was becoming a global modern plague: AIDS: The Burden of History (1988) and AIDS: The Making of a Chronic Disease (1992).⁴ These critically insightful books brought past reflections and emerging insights to bear on ongoing questions and dilemmas. In applying her keen analysis of the politics of sexuality to pressing public health issues during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, Liz’s writings about the disease and its effects among gay men, straight women, and lesbians helped inform a growing scholarship on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) health and well-being.

In 1990, Liz took over editorship of the AJPH’s historical section, “Public Health, Then and Now.” Soon joined by Ted Brown—and under the supportive guidance of AJPH editors-in-chief Mary Northridge (1998–2015) and now Alfredo Morabia (2015–present), she transformed this section into one of the most dynamic aspects of the journal, making it a go-to venue for cutting-edge history of public health scholarship. Fee and Brown also created a new feature of this section: “Voices From the Past,” which reprints original sources of public health thinkers, researchers, leaders, and activists (as per the accompanying excerpt of one of Liz’s articles). Product of the collaboration between Liz and various coauthors were tributes to African American polymath social scientist W.E.B. Du Bois; anarchist–revolutionary and nurse–midwife Emma Goldman; and socialist politician, health minister, Latin American social medicine leader, and Chilean President, Salvador Allende.

Liz also found time to work on many other topics, ranging from the history of social class as a “Missing Link in US Health Data” (coauthored with Krieger), to New York City’s garbage, to interviewing the Cuban Health Minister on sex education, to place-based history, coediting The Baltimore Book: New Views of Local History (1991).⁵ These varied interests made their way into her popular and perennially award-winning courses on women and health and history of public health, and into extracurricular highlights such as a municipal activism bus tour called “Baltimore by Bus: Steering a New Course Through the City’s History.”

After influencing countless students and many colleagues over two decades at Johns Hopkins, in 1995, Liz was named chief of the History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. In 2011, she became the Chief Historian of the National Library of Medicine, a position she held until her retirement in 2018. At the National Library of Medicine, Liz added leadership and administrative skills, as well as a talent for engaging with broader publics, to her teaching and writing finesse.

Liz’s political goal of raising historical consciousness as a conduit for societal change, her love of shows, and her sharp eye for the visual made her an effective public convener of exhibits and plays. Indeed, she oversaw the resurrection and dramatic expansion of the National Library of Medicine’s public exhibits, covering such topics as women leaders in medicine, “Emotions and Disease,” “Dream Anatomy,” “The Once and Future Web: Worlds Woven by the Telegraph and Internet,” and Frankenstein. When higher-ups questioned the inclusion of “revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara” in an exhibit that highlighted famous people with asthma, Liz winkingly accepted the directive that Che be characterized instead as a “freedom fighter.”

In the early 1990s, having long been active in various history of medicine and health professional associations, Liz helped cofound two crucial organizations that brought recognition and legitimacy to left-wing activism and scholarship in public health history. The Sigerist Circle was founded in 1990 by a group of medical and public health historians and activists to give special attention to issues of class, race, and gender, and to the use of Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and related critical methodologies in the analysis of medical history. Named for the pioneering history of medicine scholar–activist Henry Sigerist, the group’s activities include an annual scholarly session (adjacent to the meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine), participation in contemporary political affairs, and newsletters and a periodic bibliography of works otherwise difficult to locate. Fee and Brown also coedited the monumental volume Making Medical History: The Life and Times of Henry E. Sigerist (1997),⁶ bringing additional credibility to the Sigerist Circle’s work.

In 1994, Liz helped cofound the Spirit of 1848 Caucus of the American Public Health Association (APHA), which is committed to underscoring and analyzing the integral connections between social justice and public health. Both its e-mail list and its sessions at APHA’s annual meeting are aimed at working collectively and in dialogue to understand and change how social divisions based on social class, race/ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, and age affect the public’s health.

Location unknown circa 2000.

Liz was the recipient of numerous honors, including Kellogg and Fulbright fellowships, the National Library of Medicine Regents Award, and the Arthur Viseltear Award from APHA’s Medical Care Section, as well as endowed lectures across the world. Her more than 200 articles and chapters cover topics as diverse as bioterrorism, “sin versus science” in the racialized treatment of syphilis in Baltimore, and popularizing the toothbrush, ever posing the question of whether there is anything to learn from history and speaking to both specialists and a broad public of all ages.

Well aware of her critical writings, admirers of Liz’s work at the Rockefeller Foundation and the World Health Organization (WHO) invited her in the early 2000s to cochair the history working group of the Joint Learning Initiative, an effort to analyze international public health initiatives during the 20th century and uncover new insights into their successes and failures. This led to her involvement in a series of articles and a coauthored monograph (with Marcos Cueto and Brown) examining the vagaries of global health and WHO’s role therein.⁷ The book covers the contentious politics, personae, and programs spanning WHO’s aspirational post–World War II beginnings, the tensions and turnarounds of the Cold War period, and the embattled contemporary era of private encroachment on WHO turf.

Without a doubt, the work of Elizabeth Fee, the doyenne of public health historians, will endure and continue to inform the critical progressive work of the many communities of practitioners, activists, politicians, and scholars around the world whose lives Liz touched and whose work she inspired.