|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
News |
|
|
|
|
YSPH Graduates Celebrate a “Noble, Inspiring” Calling
“Is this a glorious day, or what?” marveled Paul Cleary, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, as he greeted 79 graduates accepting their M.P.H. degree in front of friends and family in Battell Chapel. The balmy weather wasn’t the only reason for his lifted spirits. “Please accept our heartfelt congratulations for all you have done,” Cleary told the Class of 2009. “You've chosen a career that will lead to a better future for all of us.” Cleary introduced commencement speaker Paul Farmer as a public health crusader who is “helping the poor and changing the world.” Farmer, a medical anthropologist and professor at Harvard Medical School, opened by defining public health as “a complex set of problems requiring no shortage of disciplines,” including statistics, sociology and basic science—a range evident, he added, in the Class of 2009’s marked diversity. “Public health has always been a serious business,” he said, from 19th –century cholera outbreaks to the swine flu this spring, plus omnipresent threats like chronic disease and environmental toxicity. Farmer urged his audience not to base standards of care on income, nor to succumb to the pressure of making “false choices” under the specter of scarcity. “Better to have an honest assessment of the limitations of the resources available to us, and remember the importance of equity.” It is crucial, he said, to remain sensitized to glaring gaps in basic needs: lack of clean water, food, vaccines and primary care. “Your generation has not asked people living in poverty, victims of unfairness, to manage this by themselves,” he said. “Your generation understands the ties that bind us all.” Farmer concluded on a positive note in declaring public health “noble, inspiring, and even—I hasten to add—fun.” Mayur Desai, assistant professor in the division of Chronic Disease Epidemiology and director of the Advanced Professional M.P.H. Program, paused at the podium to jokingly update his Facebook status to “excited.” Honored as the Class of 2009’s Teacher of the Year, Desai expressed the “true joy of my ability to make a positive and statistically significant contribution to your experience,” praising the class for tackling public health issues locally (as when a team of YSPH students raised over $1,700 for AIDS Walk New Haven) and around the world.
In delivering the student address, Robert Nelb invoked school founder C.–E. A. Winslow’s definition of public health as “the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health.” Each facet of public health, he said, “gives us a set of tools to understand some of the world's most pressing challenges.” “After two years of learning how to ‘do’ public health, it is fitting to reflect on why we do it,” he said. Nelb noted that students have worked hard to help improve conditions in New Haven and beyond, but also struggle endlessly with roadblocks and resistance. “Something deeper must pull us in—something more than outcomes and evaluation metrics; something more than fame and fortune,” he said, suggesting instead a faith in humanity and an impulse to work for the common good. In a world that sets great store on wealth, and displays more greed than goodwill, “it is because the odds are so steep, the challenge is so great, that our work in public health is needed now more than ever,” Nelb concluded. ~ Story by Melissa Pheterson
|
||
|
 |
|
