Norman Vetter: epidemiologist whose work on smallpox eradication in Bangladesh cemented his beliefs on importance of systemic change to improve health

bmj;386/aug21_8/q1775/FAF1faMy father, Norman Vetter, was a systems thinker to the end, believing that greed was an illness born of fear and that people could be empowered to rise above selfishness.His first jobs in medicine were in the emergency department and obstetrics but, while his calm head was appreciated in those often chaotic specialties, he soon realised that individual cases didn’t motivate him. Instead, he wanted to understand the causes of ill health at their roots.He got direct insight into this in 1975, when he answered a global call by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for epidemiologists and community health experts to join the World Health Organisation’s efforts to eradicate smallpox in South Asia. With my mother, Sarah—a nurse he had met at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary—my father travelled by dhow to remote villages in the Ganges Delta, diagnosing cases and administering vaccines with the bifurcated needle. On…
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