Fifty years ago, USC established what would become known as the Arnold School of Public Health, the state's only accredited public health school. Its mission, then and now, is to improve population health and well-being, promote healthy environments and prevent disease, disability and environmental degradation.
TRANSCRIPT
If you had been a public health detective in the late 1800s, you might have found yourself investigating an outbreak of typhoid fever on the campus of South Carolina College, the precursor of today’s University of South Carolina.
It was feared that two open wells on the Horseshoe — the primary water source for students and professors — were harboring the salmonella bacteria that causes typhoid. In 1898, the wells were arched over to help prevent contamination. Not long afterwards, indoor plumbing was installed, which rid the campus of outhouses and open wells — an unsavory combination that had helped usher in the age of public health across the United States.
I’m Chris Horn for Remembering the Days, and today public health takes the spotlight, specifically the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina. It’s the only accredited public health school in the state, and its efforts to improve human health have been going strong for 50 years. But the story of public health began much earlier.
State health boards began to emerge in the United States in the late 1800s in response to deadly outbreaks of cholera and typhoid, sickness from contaminated food products, outbreaks of measles and whooping cough and many other maladies. Malaria-carrying mosquitoes were a leading cause of death in the Southeast.
The country’s public health apparatus, which at first had only focused on the health of sailors, expanded its mission to protect the entire population. As vaccines became available for some diseases, public health doctors and nurses helped administer them. Public health regulations made some industrial workplaces safer by reducing exposure to dangerous toxins. Public health campaigns promoted healthier lifestyles, which eventually translated to fewer deaths from heart disease and stroke.
There’s still a long way to go, of course, but in terms of overall public health we’re a quantum leap ahead of where we were in the late 19th century when Carolina had its typhoid scare.
By the 1960s and early ‘70s, the University of South Carolina had a critical mass of professors with expertise in various aspects of public health. USC asked for permission to launch a public health college, and in 1974 got the green light from the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education and the state legislature. The college opened in 1975 with 34 students pursuing master’s of public health degrees.
Lill Mood had earned a nursing degree from USC in 1962. One of her courses was in public health nursing, and her career soon shifted in that direction. To gain more expertise, Lill joined the first cohort of students in USC’s newly formed public health college. She quickly learned that public health professionals see the world through multiple lenses.
Lill Mood: “We learned to value what the epidemiologists brought, the administrative students, the environmental students, the health education, those were the tracks. And we learned to value what each one brought to the enterprise of public health. And I said, they really taught us that public health is a team sport. You need a lot of different kinds of expertise.
"Clean water. Waste disposal. Clean air. All of those things that interlink with our — the environment — that the public health workforce has the comprehensive understanding to see what those linkages are and to know where you need to intervene with a community health problem.”
The first dean of the School of Public Health was Rolf Linton, who focused on enrolling students like Lill Mood who were already in the state’s public health workforce. Linton didn’t stay at USC for long, but his successor, Winona Vernberg, would serve as dean of the school for 18 years.
Vernberg was committed to building a strong academic foundation in several key areas, including epidemiology and biostatistics, which study the causes and distribution of diseases; environmental health sciences, which investigates how environmental factors like pollution affect human health; communication sciences and disorders, which includes audiology and speech and language pathology; exercise science, which studies the effect of exercise on fitness and health; and health services policy and management, which aims to optimize quality and cost-effective health care services.
As time went on, the school added physical therapy, athletic training and other health-related degree programs.
Vernberg was succeeded in 1998 by Harris Pastides, who 10 years later became president of the university. Donna Richter was the dean after Pastides, and Tom Chandler led the school from 2007 to 2024.
In 2000, during USC’s Bicentennial Campaign, Columbia businessman Norman Arnold and his wife, Gerry Sue, gave $10 million to support the School of Public Health, which was renamed the Arnold School of Public Health and in so doing became the first named school of public health at a public university.
Russ Pate, a professor in the school’s exercise science department for more than 50 years, says the gift immediately boosted the school’s reputation.
Russ Pate: “It just changed the way people looked at the School of Public Health here. It just seemed to come with a sense of credibility and gravitas and people just thought it was wonderful. It was like it gave the school an external stamp of approval.
"It was important to the future of the school. I think it just really created a sense that, wow, these people must have something going on.”
Fifteen years later, while Tom Chandler was dean of the school, the Arnolds pledged another $7 million to support the school’s efforts to address childhood obesity, stroke recovery and healthy aging.
Chandler says support from private donors like the Arnolds and from federal research agencies have helped the school expand its efforts to improve health across the state. The school continues to attract large numbers of students who want to work in some aspect of public health.
Tom Chandler: “The undergrad degree we started in, I think we accepted our first students in the spring of 2007. We had eight transfers and then it grew from those eight students to we have 2,800 today. We're the largest, I think, the best undergraduate program in public health in the country. Our graduate program about doubled in size over that period. We're around 800 to 900 graduate students and a lot of doctoral students. One of the largest doctoral populations in the country.”
Chandler says Arnold School of Public Health students are making an impact in South Carolina and beyond.
Tom Chandler: “If they stop at the bachelor's degree, many of them go into community health programs. County health departments hire a lot of our graduates. The doctoral students, they're all over the country, all over the world, doing just about everything you can imagine in the sphere of public health.
“We have the athletic training program. That's another one that's very highly ranked in the country. And they work with just about every high school in the state, training athletic trainers with sports programs.”
Tara Sabo-Attwood is the sixth dean to lead the Arnold School of Public Health, which is celebrating its 50th year in 2025. Sabo-Attwood says many of the early threats to public health that this country faced a century or two ago have largely been vanquished, thanks to improved sanitation, vaccination and other basic efforts.
She says some of the current threats to public health are more stubborn and are being chipped away incrementally. Think of chronic conditions such as obesity and cardiovascular disease.
Other threats, such as yellow fever and malaria that I mentioned earlier, have long been eradicated in South Carolina but still exist worldwide, endangering populations in many developing countries. Some threats are much less visible, but the specter of their return is ever present. The 2025 measles outbreak in Texas is a case in point.
Tara Sabo-Attwood: “I heard some of these stories from like my grandparents who had siblings that died from polio. For them, it was more real because they saw it. I think for the generations after that, including mine, we just haven't been able to witness that. And so it becomes a little bit out of sight, out of mind.
“We don't see people dying every day from diseases like polio and things like that because we have vaccines, and we have had very successful campaigns for people to get vaccinated over the years. And we're starting to see some of that change. But I do think some of it is — if it's not in your face, then it doesn't have a huge impact, right? If you travel around the rest of the world, which I have, it is outstanding what you see. It is very different and it changes the way that you think about health, about the way you think about people, the way you think about humanity. I had the opportunity to go to Haiti a number of years ago now. It's life changing going to a place like that where you have 11 million people that are mostly all of low economic status, who don't have regular access to health care and vaccines and all the things. And so all the outcomes of that, you see in real time, right in front of you, it becomes very tangible.”
As the Arnold School marks its 50-year milestone, Sabo-Attwood says it’s a time to both reflect on what has been accomplished and to address the continuing threats to the health of the public.
Tara Sabo-Attwood: “I think one of the responsibilities that we have as the only accredited school of public health in the state and being at the flagship university is that we are here to serve the state of South Carolina and the constituents that are in it. And so addressing all of the very challenging health complexities that we have in this state, many of which are common to the nation and the world, but some unique ones as well.
“We're trying to push prevention in the space of health for communities. We're also trying to train the workforce. So it's really important to us that we are giving the skill sets that are needed to the next generation of public health workers, so that they can go out and continue to tackle these challenging health issues.”
That’s all for this episode. On the next Remembering the Days, we’re talking with Jim Bowers, a 1967 USC graduate who earned a law degree from Harvard, then returned to Carolina in 1973 to become the first Black professor in the School of Law. That’s next on Remembering the Days.
