Pioneer in sociomedical sciences
June 30, 1917 – February 13, 2017
Dr. Jack Elinson was the founder of Columbia University’s Department of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, the first such department in a public health school in the country. He is a pioneer in the field of sociomedical science, which incorporates sociology, anthropology, economics, history, political science, social psychology, and philosophy into the study of health and medicine. He is especially noted for looking at health through a different lens, measuring the “quality of life,” by the “5 Ds”: dissatisfaction, discomfort, disability, disease and death.
Dr. Elinson was born Israel Jacob in 1917 at home (“because I wanted to be close to my mother,” he often quipped) in the Bronx. His parents immigrated from Russia; his father, Zusha, was a paper hanger and his mother, the former Rebecca Block, died when he was six-years-old.
He grew up in the Bronx, Harlem and Richmond Hill, Queens, raised by his father, his older sister Annie and his paternal grandparents. He attended Boys’ High in Brooklyn (riding the subway two hours each way from the last stop on the IND Lefferts Boulevard subway line) and graduated from City College of New York with a degree in chemistry and psychology at the age of 20 in 1937.
During World War II, he served as a social science analyst in the War Department in Washington, D.C. and in the South Pacific, working with leading sociologists including Sam Stouffer, Leonard Cottrell, Shirley Star, Robin Williams, and Louis Guttman, researching morale and attitudes of U.S. GIs. Their work was later compiled in the groundbreaking volume The American Soldier. He received his Masters degree from George Washington University in 1946, and his PhD in Social Psychology from George Washington University in 1954.
During his time at the War Department, he met May Gomberg, who had come from Chicago to work in the Department of Labor Statistics, as part of the war effort. They married in 1941.
Dr. Elinson was a passionate advocate for racial equality and relished meeting international visitors at conferences focusing on social inequities and the new field of sociomedical sciences. These ideas were not well accepted at his workplace – the War Department, which was then located in the Pentagon. In 1950, Elinson was targeted by the Army-McCarthy hearings and questioned about his “unduly fraternizing with colored persons,” his visits to the Washington Bookstore where left-wing books were sold, and why he allowed his younger sister Marcelle to date a man from the “Communist-led Seaman’s Union.” Though many friends and colleagues, including military officers, testified on his behalf, the threatening atmosphere was deemed perilous by the couple, who now had four small children under the age of six.
So when Elinson was offered a position at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) in Chicago, they picked up their lives and moved to May’s hometown. In addition to his work at NORC, Dr. Elinson, he also was an adjunct professor of sociology at the University of Chicago from 1954 to 1956.
One of the projects he worked on at NORC was a landmark study with Dr. Ray Trussell, Chronic Illness in a Rural Area, which demonstrated much higher rates of chronic disease among a rural population in New Jersey than were reported in personal interviews. The pioneering study was the first to include both on-site clinical examinations along with questionnaires in a probability study of the general population to collect valuable health data. Following that study, when Dr. Trussell became Dean of the Columbia School of Public Health in 1956, he recruited Dr. Elinson to Columbia, and the family relocated to Teaneck, New Jersey.
When Dr. Elinson joined the faculty of the School of Public Health (then part of Columbia’s Medical School), there was no role for a social scientist in the field and no social scientist on the faculty of the school. He asked the librarian to order books that reflected social science disciplines, including work by Michael Harrington, Oscar Lewis, and Thorsten Veblen. The librarian refused his request, claiming that those works had nothing to do with medicine. Elinson recalled that he had to get the “downtown” – liberal arts – campus library to stock them for his students.
In 1968, he founded the Department of Sociomedical Sciences (which began as a division) and headed the department from 1968 to 1978, and again from1982 to 1985. Elinson's research focused on assessing and addressing unmet needs for health care, and evaluating the effectiveness of health services. He and his collaborators carried out health surveys in Washington Heights and Puerto Rico, opinion surveys of mental health issues, studies of multiphasic automated testing for health, and drug use surveys of teenagers. He also directed the innovative Harlem Hospital Center Patient Care and Program Evaluation department from 1966 to 1971.
In the more than half a century that he served at Columbia as professor, department chair, and mentor, Dr. Elinson was recognized as a leader in the development of public health as a sociomedical science. He is acclaimed for bringing a new understanding of health measures. Instead of focusing on a medical model, he created the paradigm of the Five Ds: death, disease, disability, discomfort and dissatisfaction. This model is now widely used in assessing quality of life.
Elinson explained, “Social determinants such as socioeconomic status, the neighborhood you live in, the kind of family relations you have, the social networks which you exist in all contribute to people’s health or ill health. If you want to look at these questions, the way to study that is to use sociomedical science, which includes all the social sciences bearing on health questions.”
Dr. Elinson was deeply committed to improving health care delivery in developing countries, particularly Latin America. He helped establish the School of Public Health at the University of Puerto Rico, and led several studies there including an island-wide household survey of 3,000 families examining medical care use, and a report on the career attitudes of doctors and nurses, published in 1962 as Medical and Hospital Care in Puerto Rico. He served as a consultant with the Pan-American Health Organization (PA-HO) and designed and analyzed public health programs in the Dominican Republic, Argentina and Cuba.
When he retired from Columbia in 1986, Dr. Elinson was granted emeritus status and continued to teach classes and mentor students. He also was appointed distinguished visiting professor at the Rutgers University Institute of Health Care Policy. He is the author, co-author and editor of numerous books and wrote approximately one hundred articles, book chapters, and government reports. In addition to those cited above, his books include Community Fact Book for Washington Heights, New York City (1963), Public Image of Mental Health Services (1967, with Elena Padilla and Marvin E. Perkins), Ethnic and Educational Data on Adults in New York City (1967, with Paul Haberman and Cyrille Gell), and SocioMedical Health Indicators (1979 with Athilia E. Siegmann). His papers are preserved in the Archives and Special Collections of the Columbia University Health Sciences Library. He is also the subject of an award-winning documentary, “Jack Elinson: Pioneer in the Sociomedical Sciences.”
An engaging and witty speaker, Dr. Elinson spoke at public health conferences around the world. He attended the first meeting of the American Association of Public Opinion Research in 1946, and served as its president in 1979-80. He was a fellow of the American Sociological Association, and received its Leo Reeder Award for Distinguished Contributions to Medical Sociology in 1985. A member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, he also served on the board of the Medical and Health Research Association of New York City and the Bergen County New Jersey Tuberculosis and Health Association. He was honored with a National Merit Award from the Delta Omega Society (the honorary society in the field of public health) and a Festschrift (special tribute issue) of Social Science and Medicine in 1989. Columbia University grants the Jack Elinson Award to a graduate student who is the author of the best published paper in sociomedical sciences.
An amateur photographer and polyglot, Elinson spoke Spanish, German and Yiddish, and enjoyed singing in all three. Even into his nineties, he enjoyed regaling his family with a full-throated version of the Internationale in Yiddish. He traveled widely, and delighted in showing off his hometown of New York City to international visitors. They were enthralled with his intriguing stories about city spots that were off the beaten tracks, from the best pickle shop on the Lower East Side to the Apollo Theater in Harlem, where as a teenager he had cut class to listen to the likes of Billie Holiday, Count Basie and Bessie Smith.
He would often combine his professional research with travel adventures for his family. Together, they piled into a station wagon and crossed the country to California, Mexico, and back to their grandparents’ home in Chicago, car camping and stopping at numerous historic sites, museums and national parks. When working in Puerto Rico, he took each of the four children with him over school vacations, introducing them to the Spanish language, the island culture, and his public health colleagues.
He was predeceased by his wife May, a clinical nutritionist at the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry, who died in 2010. He is survived by his four children: Richard (Lynn) of Huntington, New York, Elaine (Rene CiriaCruz) of San Francisco, California, Mitchell (Sande) of Roosevelt Island, New York and Robert (Cecelia) of Hillsdale, New York; seven grandchildren: Alex, Sara, Morgan, Blake, Matthew, Zusha and Sarah; and five great-grandchildren: Max, Zane, Keira, Mace and Stella Mae. The family wishes to express deep gratitude to William Amponseh who cared for Dr. Elinson in his later years.
Today, all major schools of public health in the United States teach sociomedical sciences. Former students of Dr. Elinson have continued his pioneering work on the impact of race and poverty on health at universities and health care agencies around the world.
At Columbia, where a medical librarian first refused to purchase sociology books for the graduate students in public health, there is now a collection entitled the Jack Elinson Sociomedical Sciences Library.
Donations in honor of Dr. Jack Elinson may be made to:
Elinson Prize Endowment Fund (Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, 722 W. 168th Street, Room 1401,New York, New York 10032)
City University of New York (City College Fund, Shepard Hall, Room 166, 160 Convent Avenue, New York, New York, 10031-9986)
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU, 125 Broad Street, New York, New York 10004
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