CDC history: James H. Steele, DVM, MPH. Part I.”

Dr. Steele discussed establishment of the veterinary corps, first at the NIH under Dr. Joseph Mountin and then as a program at the CDC. He described how CDC collaboration began with a rabies laboratory in Montgomery, Alabama. He began the interview by describing his public health career with a PHS fellowship and MPH at Harvard. He described meeting Mountain while doing milk sanitation in Puerto Rico as well as difficulties in controlling psittacosis, cleaning salmonella off meat carcasses, cutting into a bat brain while tracing wild rabies, and reporting on foot-and-mouth in Mexico. He told fun stories of how the Pan American sanitary bureau survey in the Dominican Republic lead him to trouble with Trujillo's racehorses, where, after he gave advice, he was expected to stay and heal the horse. In another story about studying encephalitis and polio in Panama, a miscommunication led to receipt of ambulances for his sick mice!

Transcript

Stephen B. Thacker CDC Library collection
David J. Sencer CDC Museum