The Harvard T.H. Chan School is the first professional public health training program in America, founded in 1913 as a collaboration between Harvard and MIT (known as the Harvard-MIT School for Health Officers). The evolution of the program and impact of its faculty and staff is best understood by reviewing primary source materials, maintained in the archives of the Center for the History of Medicine at Countway Library. In 2014 Heather Mumford, Archivist for the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, created a LibGuide to track these historical public health collections and make them easier to discover.

This year, in honor of the archive program’s 10 year anniversary (2024), Mumford has further expanded this guide to include the evolution of each modern Harvard Chan department. After careful research conducted between 2020-2022, the guide now includes historic names and chairs for each department. These histories will continue to evolve and expand as Mumford meets with each individual department over the next year, with a goal of collaboratively creating and disseminating a narrative history for each department that will further expand on their impact and legacies.

We invite you to explore the History of Public Health at Harvard LibGuide.