Howard H. Hyatt, the physician, scientist, and scholar who reshaped the field of public health and redirected it from the narrow study of infectious diseases to the big picture issues of financial and social responsibility in medicine, announced on Saturday that He died at his home in Cambridge. , Massachusetts, and he was 98 years old.
Her son Jonathan Hyatt said the cause was pulmonary hypertension.
Harvard Public Health, a magazine published by the Harvard School of Public Health, where Dr. Hyatt served as dean for 12 years, wrote in 2013 that Dr. Hyatt had “made public health the conscience of medicine.”
Early in his 70-year career, Dr. Hyatt worked in Paris with future Nobel laureates on the discovery of messenger RNA, a key component of cell biology. He then visited the White House to appeal to President Ronald Reagan to end the era's nuclear weapons buildup, which Dr. Hyatt called “the last epidemic.”
A Harvard-trained physician who held leadership positions at some of the nation's most prestigious hospitals, Dr. Hyatt was an outspoken critic of inequities in American health care. He accused American health care of leaning toward expensive, high-tech treatments that exclude millions of people from basic treatment.
In his 1987 book, “American Health Is in the Balance: Choice or Chance?'' he argued for government-run universal health care modeled on aspects of the British, Canadian, and Chinese systems. “I am particularly anxious to reach out to those who are insensitive enough to accept the possibility of second-class medical care in America,” he told the Toronto Star.
The Harvard School of Public Health (now the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health), where Dr. Hyatt served as dean from 1972 to 1984, brought together experts across fields such as biostatistics and health management, and brought together experts in economics, economics, and health care. Focused on political issues. In addition to biological factors, there may also be social causes of poor health.
“He changed education at the Harvard School of Public Health and the very definition of what the field of public health meant,” said Dr. Hyatt's colleague Harvey, who became director of the Institute of Medicine in 2002. Dr. V. Feinberg says: (National Academy of Medicine) in an interview.
Dr. Hyatt later turned his attention outside the continental United States and became the founder of the Department of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. This is an unusual initiative for a teaching hospital, as it expands resources to care for sick and poor people overseas.
The program was the launching pad for Partners in Health, a highly regarded nonprofit organization founded in 1987 that provides health care to impoverished communities in places like Haiti and Africa. The organization's founders included Harvard medical students Paul Farmer and Jim Yong Kim. He regarded Dr. Hyatt as a father figure.
“He took it upon himself to mentor literally hundreds of young people who graduated from Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital and wanted to make a difference in the world,” Dr. Kim said in an interview. Ta.
When Dr. Kim and Dr. Farmer discovered an outbreak of drug-resistant tuberculosis in Peru in 1995, they billed the Brigham Hospital pharmacy for $100,000 for a special drug. Soon, the hospital director was on the phone with Dr. Hyatt complaining about the debt. Dr. Hyatt found a donor to cover the cost and then helped Partners in Health secure his $45 million grant from the Gates Foundation.
Dr. Farmer, the subject of Tracy Kidder's 2003 book Beyond the Mountain: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, the Man Who Healed the World, died in 2022. Dr. Kim subsequently became president of Dartmouth College. Universities and the World Bank.
In 2011, when Dr. Kim learned that Dr. Hyatt had not actually graduated from Harvard and had skipped a grade to medical school, he wrote a “diploma” on a napkin at the Hanover Inn, and Dr. Hyatt was awarded a Dartmouth bachelor's degree. Hyatt framed it and displayed it in his home.
Howard Heim Hyatt was born July 22, 1925, in Patchogue, Long Island, New York, to Alexander and Dorothy (Askinas) Hyatt. His father immigrated from Lithuania alone when he was 15 years old. The family changed their name from Chaitowitz to Hyatt and moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, where Alexander Hyatt ran a small shoe company.
Although Howard was valedictorian of his high school, he was initially denied admission to Harvard University. He later recalled that there was a quota on the number of Jews that could be admitted at the time. After his high school principal protested to the admissions director, he was admitted in 1944, and two years later entered Harvard Medical School.
While there, he met Doris Bierlinger, a student at Wellesley College. The couple married in 1948, the year Dr. Hyatt received his medical degree, Mrs. Hyatt studied library science, and she was the founder of a magazine that reviewed books for school libraries. She passed away in her 2007 year.
In the mid-1950s, Dr. Hyatt was a researcher at the National Institutes of Health. That work led him to a one-year research position at the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1960. This institute was the center of the exciting new field of molecular biology.
In Paris, he worked under future Nobel Prize winners Jacques Monod and François Jacob, where he was the first to name and describe messenger RNA, the molecule that carries the genetic code and makes proteins. Sixty years later, messenger RNA was the basis of the first coronavirus vaccine approved for use in the United States.
Returning to Boston, Dr. Hyatt became a professor at Harvard Medical School in 1963 and chief physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. His research focused on applying molecular biology to medical problems, particularly cancer. He was one of the first people to demonstrate messenger RNA in mammalian cells.
He raised the standards of research and clinical practice at the hospital, which began to attract medical graduates seeking medical training. The medical school sought to hire Dr. Hyatt as dean. He turned down admissions to Columbia University and Yale University before accepting a leadership position at the Harvard School of Public Health.
“Historically, the school has been very strong in tropical medicine, sanitary engineering, and other specialties, but it seems to have little connection to the public health issues facing this country in recent years,” The Boston Globe said. wrote Dr. Hyatt upon his appointment. 1972.
But the rapid changes he introduced made him enemies, and in 1978 a group of tenured professors signed a petition calling for his removal, alleging his “administrative incompetence.”
Harvard University President Derek Bok, who hired Dr. Hyatt, rejected attempts to fire him.
In December 1981, Dr. Hyatt joined a delegation sent by Pope John Paul II to brief President Reagan on the medical effects of a nuclear exchange. “The president wasn't too happy about our visit,” Dr. Hyatt recalled in 2006 for Web of Stories, an archive of oral history by scientists and others.
In addition to his son Jonathan, a labor lawyer, Dr. Hyatt has a daughter, Deborah Hyatt, who is an artist. his brother Arnold Hyatt; He has eight grandchildren. four great-grandchildren; and his longtime companion, Penny Janeway. His son, Fred Hiatt, a longtime editorial page editor at The Washington Post, died in 2021.
In 2004, Dr. Hyatt and his wife established a residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital to train physicians in internal medicine and global public health. Many of the 70 or so doctors who went through the program went on to work in Haiti, Lesotho and other poor countries where Partners in Health works.
Dr. Jonathan Hyatt said Dr. Hyatt visited many international clinics, which gave him inspiration and purpose in his later years.
“This essentially added 15 years to my father's career,” he added.
