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The James Watt-Zdenek Fejfar correspondance from 1992 James Watt was an early director of the U.S. National Heart Institute
(NHI), beginning in 1952. Zdenek Fejfar was the first director of the
Cardiovascular Disease Unit of the World Health Organization (WHO)
from 1957. They became fast friends. Fejfar's appointment, and the
success of his efforts, owe much to the support and collegiality of
Watt and the NHI.
These letters were given me for the Minnesota CVD Epidemiology History
Archive on my visit to Fejfar in Prague in June, 2002, a short time
before he died. After an hour or so recording of an oral history,
Zdenek interrupted me with the short dissertation paraphrased here:
"Henry, Hanka and I have no children. My institute in Prague cares
nothing for my papers or my history in the CVD Unit of WHO. WHO
itself, can you believe it, has no formal archive. So please, Henry,
take these letters and these photographs. Keep them for your archive
in Minnesota. Do something good with them."
By then I was near tears.
Nothing better could be done with Fejfar's papers than to archive them
and make them accessible to all. The excellent photographic collection
is in the photographic segment of this website. The personal
correspondence is given here in its entirety, unedited. Copies of the
actual typed letters are available from the archive. HB
Content:
These letters are rich in the personal and organizational history of
James Watt. He received his MD and MPH degrees from Johns Hopkins in
the mid-1930s and immediately joined the U.S. Public Health Service to
work for some years in infectious diseases. He became enamored of
international medicine and jumped at the opportunity to head the new
NHI in 1952. He describes modestly his indoctrination into cardiology
at the 2nd World Congress in Washington, DC in 1954 and his role over
the years in establishing institutions critical to CVD science and
epidemiology, including the National Library of Medicine, the
Framingham Study, the Tecumseh Study, Primate Research Centers
(modeled after the USSR), the National Institute of Aging, and the WHO
Cardiovascular Disease Unit.
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