William H. Park

When William Hallock Park was born in New York City, in 1863, epidemics recurred with devastating certainty. Smallpox still killed and scarred its thousands. Diphtheria and cholera infantum kept the infant death rate at the appalling figure of almost one in four. The span of his seventy-five years witnessed the conquering of all these diseases and the cutting of infant mortality to one in a hundred.

Park’s contributions to this extraordinary progress came at vital points, notably in respect to diphtheria. There was, in addition, a lifetime of tireless leadership on every battlefront in the unending war against disease. New Yorkers have been so scornful of their city’s government, save in its few periods of enlightenment, that they tend to be cynical of all local achievements. The conquest of disease has long been a shining exception to the general darkness of New York’s self-government. And Park, born in New York, educated at the College of the City of New York and the College of Physicians and Surgeons, gave a lifetime of the highest public service as bacteriologist for the Health Department of the City and the State.

It was a labor with countless public contacts and including the necessity of public education in a dozen fields that Park performed. Yet he never weakened in his devotion to research or lost the modesty of the true scientist. At a banquet in his honor in 1933 Park said: “I have done nothing alone. I am simply the man of circumstance to whom the praise has gone. My associates know what I mean. They, not I, have started America on the course of a belief in preventive medicine.”

Nevertheless, his leadership in the drive against diphtheria, that has rendered that once dread disease all but harmless, stands as his own unquestioned monument. His name is suitably commemorated in the new William Hallock Park Laboratory at Sixteenth Street and the East River. Centurions saw all too little of Park at the club-house; as individuals and as citizens they cannot forget the health preserved, the tragedy prevented, by this retiring fellow-member, the city’s greatest physician-at-large.

Geoffrey Parsons
1939 Century Memorials