Former Public Health Dean Howard Hiatt Remembered as ‘Distinguished’ and ‘Selfless’
Howard H. Hiatt ’46 — prominent physician and former longtime dean of the Harvard School of Public Health — died at his home in Cambridge on March 2. He was 98.
Howard H. Hiatt ’46 — prominent physician and former longtime dean of the Harvard School of Public Health — died at his home in Cambridge on March 2. He was 98.
In his decades of work in the Boston hospital system and within Harvard’s academic and administrative ranks, Hiatt established numerous academic programs and taught countless students.
As an administrator, Hiatt sought to broaden connections between medicine and global health, teaching students applicable skills for navigating an increasingly complex healthcare system. At Harvard, Hiatt also sought to strengthen the School of Public Health, strengthening its place within the University.
Sheila Davis — CEO of Partners in Health, a non-profit global health organization Hiatt served on the board of — praised Hiatt for his lasting positive impact.
“His legacy will live on through the many lives he improved and those he inspired to work in pragmatic solidarity with some of the world’s most impoverished communities,” Davis said.
‘A Distinguished Clinician’
Howard Hiatt was born on July 22, 1925 in Long Island, New York, to Alexander and Dorothy Hiatt. His family later moved to Worcester, Mass., where his father, a Lithuanian immigrant, ran a small shoe company.
Despite early academic success and graduating high school as valedictorian, Hiatt was initially rejected from Harvard College. During the period of time he sought admission to college, Harvard still retained a quota on the number of Jewish students who could be admitted.
But in 1944 — after his high school principal protested to Harvard’s dean of admissions — Hiatt was allowed to enroll at the College. A member of Dunster House, he graduated in only two years. Hiatt then attended Harvard Medical School — from which he again graduated in only two years.
During his time at Harvard, Hiatt met Doris Bieringer — a student at Wellesley College — who would later become his wife in 1948.
After medical school, Hiatt moved to the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to complete his clinical internship and residency. He then served as a research fellow at the Weill Cornell Medical Center and assistant at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
Between 1953 and 1955, Hiatt also served as an investigator at the National Institute of Health before returning to BIDMC and HMS.
Five years later, Hiatt left the U.S. to study and work under Jacques Monod and François Jacob — prominent French biologists and Nobel laureates — for one year at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
In 1963, Hiatt became BIDMC’s Physician-in-Chief and Blumgart Professor of Medicine at HMS.
During his tenure as Physician-in-Chief, Hiatt used his research background to broaden the goals of BIDMC, transforming the center into one of the first teaching hospitals in the nation to develop both teaching and research programs in primary care. In particular, he focused on the applications of molecular biology to clinical care.
Before long, Hiatt again moved up in the academic and administrative ranks at Harvard, this time leaving for an entirely new corner of the University.
In 1972, then-Harvard President Derek C. Bok appointed Hiatt as dean of the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, calling him “a proven administrator and a distinguished clinician and research scholar.”
In an interview with The Crimson after his appointment, Hiatt acknowledged his lack of experience in public health but said he hoped to bring a fresh perspective to the school.
In particular, Hiatt pointed to the “distortion of priorities in the health fields” and emphasized the need for comprehensive preventive health programs in addition to medical cures.
In an interview in 2006 for Web of Stories, Hiatt recalled a conversation he had with Bok before he selected Hiatt for the HSPH deanship.
During their meeting, Hiatt said, Bok remarked that the school was “not in good condition intellectually.”
“‘You have three choices,’” Hiatt said Bok told him. “‘You can close it, you can merge it with the Medical School, or you can change it very appreciably from the outside.’”
Bok refused to do the former, instead asking Hiatt to join him in reshaping the school with him. Hiatt agreed.
‘Elevated the School’
According to Bok, Hiatt had two “unusual” talents as dean.
“One was the ability to interest established scholars elsewhere in the University to convince them of the intellectual interest of public health problems,” Bok said.
The second was Hiatt’s propensity for attracting promising young academics.
“He did a very splendid job of finding new blood that were very bright, very ambitious — people passionately interested in the whole medical care system,” Bok added.
Julio J. Frenk — who served as HSPH dean from 2009 to 2015 — said Hiatt identified the “very fundamental connection” between medicine and public health and successfully promoted that during his tenure.
“He demonstrated that, and that elevated the School of Public Health in a major way,” Frenk said.
Barry R. Bloom, who served as dean of HSPH from 1998 to 2008, pointed to this expertise in medicine that led Hiatt to build the Department of Health Policy and Management dedicated to teaching students the skills necessary to operate and lead a healthcare system.
“He knew medicine well. He knew running a hospital well,” Bloom said. “And he knew the chaos of the finances of medicine, the lack of accountability, the difficulties in dealing with insurance reimbursements.”
“Now every school of public health in the country has a department of health policy and management,” he said.
Hiatt also established the HSPH Summer Program in Clinical Effectiveness — an educational program for clinicians that integrates epidemiological thinking into clinical research.
“That is still one of the most successful programs at the Harvard School of Public Health,” Frenk said.
But Hiatt’s legacy at HSPH extended beyond his administrative endeavors.
According to Jonathan P. Hiatt ’70, Howard Hiatt’s son, his father was one of few pro-labor administrators during the early 1980s.
During Hiatt’s tenure as dean of HSPH, Harvard’s clerical workers staged a union organizing drive, which the University administration largely fought very strongly, according to Jonathan Hiatt.
“My dad was the only dean of the schools who was supportive,” he said.
But the rapid era of change during Hiatt’s tenure led to considerable faculty pushback.
In 1978, two-thirds of the senior faculty at HSPH signed a petition calling for his resignation.
Bok then issued a strong rebuttal to the faculty in defense of Hiatt.
“As I would have suspected at the outset, the problem was that they didn’t want to change, and they didn’t know how much they needed to change,” Bok said in a Friday interview with The Crimson.
“Howard was doing the kind of work that had to be done if the school was ever to gain a really high reputation worthy of Harvard,” he added.
Six years after the petition, Hiatt stepped down from the deanship. Still, he insisted that his resignation was not in response to the criticism.
Rather, Hiatt said, one decade as dean had been long enough, and it was time to move on.
‘Such a Gift’
Hiatt’s experience in medicine and healthcare also drew him into political advisory roles.
In 1980, Hiatt met with Pope John Paul II and joined a special delegation dedicated to educating world leaders on the health effects of nuclear war.
One year later, Hiatt met with then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan to discuss nuclear war. In a New York Times interview after the meeting, Hiatt said that he “tried to personalize” the detrimental impacts, telling Reagan “there would be 800,000 people in shock from burns and radiation.”
“Those people who talk about winning or surviving a nuclear war don’t understand what they are talking about,” Hiatt said at the time.
In 1985, after leaving his post at the helm of HSPH, Hiatt was recruited to join the Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
There, he helped found the Research Training Program in Clinical Effectiveness, one of the first post-residency programs to prepare trainees for conducting clinical trials.
Two decades later, Hiatt co-founded BWH’s Division of Global Health Equity in 2001 with two former mentees: renowned Harvard physician Paul Farmer and former World Bank President and former Dartmouth President Jim Yong Kim.
Hiatt, Farmer, and Kim — alongside other colleagues — created and launched the Global Health Equity residency just three years later. The program was later renamed in honor of Hiatt and his wife in recognition of his commitment to mentorship and contributions to BWH.
Joseph J. Rhatigan, the residency’s current director, praised Hiatt for his ability to connect with students.
“Howard was the kind of mentor that you aspire to be,” Rhatigan said. “He was selfless, he was a listener, he really tried to understand the person he was talking to.”
“Almost all of our graduates were very close with Howard,” he said.
Bloom also pointed to the number of prominent students Hiatt has taught over the years.
“Many of the giants of academic medicine and public health were mentored by him as residents,” he said.
Hiatt displayed his long relationships with mentees in his involvement with Partners in Health — a global health organization dedicated to bringing better healthcare to underserved populations around the world — which was founded by Farmer and Kim. Hiatt served as an early supporter of the organization and sat on their board.
According to Jonathan Hiatt, Howard Hiatt was intent on ensuring that Partners in Health recognized that there were healthcare inequities not only in developing countries, but also in the United States.
In particular, Hiatt worked to improve health outcomes in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood and the Navajo Nation.
HMS associate professor Sonya S. Shin, who worked with Hiatt to expand the global health equity model to the Navajo Nation, said that during home visits, Hiatt had an ability to connect with “any person as if it was a family member of his own.”
“It was just such a gift to be able to witness,” she added.
According to Bloom, Hiatt was always focused on “a vision of where things were going to go.”
“As the famous hockey player once said, you don’t look to see where the puck is going. You look to see where it’s going to be,” Bloom said. “And that was Howard.”
—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.
—Staff writer Akshaya Ravi can be reached at akshaya.ravi@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @akshayaravi22.