Charles Franklin Craig: Fifty Years of Work and Service in Tropical Medicine

Abstract

When your committee invited me to prepare and deliver this, the sixteenth Charles Franklin Craig Lecture, my first reaction was to decline the honor, knowing full well that I could not hope to present an address to equal some of the previous masterful lectures of this series. However, since it would afford an opportunity to remind ourselves of the vast amount of valuable work and service in the field of tropical medicine done during the past half century by a worthy contemporary and friend, there was no choice but to accept. The medical career of Charles Franklin Craig began towards the close of the nineteenth century. He was born and reared at Danbury, Connecticut, and received his medical degree from Yale University in 1894. Following his graduation, he returned to Danbury to practice. The Spanish-American war came in 1898 and was followed by several years of occupation and the rehabilitation of the health and welfare of the people of tropical lands which had been liberated from long years of tyranical Spanish domination and misrule.