Dean During HSPH ‘Golden Age’ Dies

Dr. John C. Snyder, a former dean of the Harvard School for Public Health (HSPH) who oversaw the school’s greatest period of expansion in a tenure that spanned a fifth of its existence, died Feb. 19, in Peterborough, N.H. He was 91.

Known for his scientific work as well as his administrative skill, Snyder quadrupled the school’s endowment during his tenure, which lasted from 1954 to 1971. With the money he raised, he oversaw the building of new research and residence facilities that expanded the HSPH campus along Huntington Avenue in Boston.

“Snyder brought the school from a rather small and rather limited scope and enlarged its scope and facilities,” said Dr. John B. Little, who joined the HSPH faculty in 1965.

Under Snyder’s term, the school built two of its main research facilities, known simply as Buildings I and II, as well as an administrative center. His 17-year tenure marked an unusually productive time for HSPH: the next new building after Snyder’s retirement was not erected until 1995, more than two decades after he left.

“When I was a student, there was nothing. There was a crummy old building called 695 Huntington, and just two buildings total,” said Dr. Robert Chang, who studied under Snyder at HSPH from 1950 to 1952, just before he became dean. “[Snyder] was really the first dean to raise so much money for the building project of the School of Public Health.”

Snyder was born in 1910 in Salt Lake City. When he was a boy, his family moved to Pasadena, where he decided to follow in the footsteps of his father, a surgeon who kept up a busy practice.

He earned his undergraduate degree from Stanford University in 1931 and graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1935. While an intern on the surgical staff at Massachusetts General Hospital, Snyder contracted scarlet fever and spent six weeks in quarantine, later returning home to California to complete his recovery.

Snyder would later say that, although he had originally planned to become a surgeon, his interest shifted toward medical research—particularly infectious diseases—after his bout with scarlet fever.

During the Second World War, Snyder served in the Army Medical Corps and helped develop new treatments for typhus. He was appointed to the U.S. Typhus Commission by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and during the course of his work contracted the disease.

After the war, he came to Harvard as a professor of microbiology and quickly was appointed head of HSPH’s new Department of Public Health Bacteriology. In October 1954, a few months after the death of then-Dean James S. Simmons, Snyder was appointed dean of HSPH.

In addition to raising money and expanding the campus physically, Snyder also worked to add professors to the HSPH faculty and widen the scope of the school’s curriculum into emerging fields such as demography and human ecology.

“He did so many things,” said Dr. Thomas H. Weller, who was Strong professor of tropical public health when Snyder was dean. “He built up a very solid faculty department and student body. He was a very hard working, very honest, very dedicated individual.”

Snyder had long taken a personal interest in studying demographics and human population growth, and as dean he founded departments on behavioral sciences, demography and human ecology. He established two new professorships in those fields—two of almost a dozen new HSPH professorships that were endowed under his watch.

Snyder also built Shattuck House, the school’s first residence hall for international students, who made up about one-third of the student body during the time he was dean.

For years, Snyder had seen HSPH prosper and expand but by the end of his term, he came into conflict with many of his students. Around the time of the 1969 undergraduate sit-in of University Hall, the School of Public Health saw increasingly frequent disagreements between its students and faculty over curricular reform.

Snyder resigned in June 1971 and continued to be active in the medical field, serving a brief stint as the medical director of Harvard’s Center for Population Studies, which he had helped to found.

Snyder is survived by his wife, Virginia; two sons, Gordon and Donald; a daughter, Wendy; and six grandchildren.