GORDON NAMED TO WILDER CHAIR

Dr. John Everett Gordon, professor of Preventive Medicine and Epidemiology at the Medical School and director of the new Harvard Public Health Unit and Harvard Red Cross Hospital in England, has been promoted to the Charles Wilder chair in Preventive Medicine and Epidemiology, the University announced yesterday.

The Charles Wilder Professorship is not restricted to men in one held of medicine. It was last held by Dr. Hana Zinnaer, who was Charies wilder Professor of Bacteriology and Immunology.

Dr. Gordon recently returned from England, where he made arrangements for a Harvard Public Health Unit for field and laboratory work in epidemiology under wartime conditions and a 100-bed Harvard-Red Cross Hospital for study of war-time communicable diseases. He will return to England soon.

A recognized leader in epidemiology and public health work, he was appointed to the Medical School faculty in 1938. Formerly he was Field Director of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Medical Director of the Division of Communicable Diseases at Herman Kiefer Hospital, Detroit. He is well known as an investigator of the treatment of scarlet fever, diphtheria, erysipelas, meningitis, poliomyelitis, respiratory infections and other diseases. One of his studies for the Rockefeller Foundation was a four-year field research on scarlet fever in Rumania, an investigation in which bacteriologists in many European countries cooperated.

The Charles Wilder Professorship at the Medical School was founded in 1909 under the will of Charles Wilder and his sister Florence E. Wilder. The first holder of the chair was Dr. Milton J. Rosenau, from 1920 until his retirement in 1935, Dr. Zinsser was the second Charles wilder Professor.