Infectious diseases, tropical medicine and public health have had a long and distinguished history at the NYU-Bellevue Medical Center. Indeed Bellevue Hospital was formed to deal with the growing numbers of patients infected with two arthropod-borne diseases: yellow fever and typhus. Graduates of our medical school have ranged from Walter Reed and William Crawford Gorgas (conquerors of yellow fever), to Albert Sabin and Jonas Salk (conquerors of polio).

Our predecessor department (Preventive Medicine) was formed with Hermann M Biggs as Chair. Dr Biggs had been appointed as an Instructor within the Carnegie Laboratory in 1884. The Carnegie Building and laboratory (built on 26th Street adjacent to the old Bellevue Medical School building, which still stands) was the first bacteriology laboratory to be set up in the United States as a consequence of the bacteriological revolution of Pasteur and Koch, which swept through Europe throughout the 1880s. Dr Biggs was one of the seminal figures in public health in the United States, being responsible for the establishment of the first municipal Board of Health laboratory in the United States (in New York City), and for the establishment of model programs to control tuberculosis, diphtheria and venereal diseases.

The Hermann M Biggs Chair was held by the Chairs of our predecessor department for many years. More recently, this named Chair was transferred from our Department to the Department of Pathology, where it is now held by Professor Victor Nussenzweig.

Dr Biggs was followed as Chair by Henry Meleney and then Harry Most. In 1947, the Department was subdivided, with the Department of Environmental Medicine splitting off and moving to Sterling Forest. In 1974, the Department of Preventive Medicine, which was by then devoted entirely to parasitic diseases, became reconstituted as the Division of Parasitology within the Department of Microbiology, with Milton Salton as Chair and Ruth Nussenzweig as the Head of the Division. The Division became a full-fledged Department in July 1984, with Ruth Nussenzweig as its first Chair. This Department (Medical Parasitology) was created by the Board of Trustees of New York University to acknowledge the stature and global significance of the research being conducted by a team of internationally recognized scientists. Over a period of years, research was expanded from a focus on malaria to include the study of Entamoeba, Leishmania, African and South American Trypanosoma, Pneumocystis, and the molecular biology of mosquito vectors of disease.

After more than 25 years of leadership Dr Nussenzweig stepped down in January 2002 to return to full-time research. She was replaced by Jerome Vanderberg, who served as interim Chair until the end of 2003. Dr Karen Day was then appointed as the Chair of the Department and also as the Director of the School of Medicine’s Institute of Urban and Global Health.