NIH and the Bodies Politic

Abstract

In 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt, a polio victim who understood well the suffering and devastation caused by chronic illness, made what was then a long drive out to Bethesda, Maryland, to dedicate the campus of the new National Institutes of Health (NIH). When he made this trek, our nation was just recovering from the worst economic depression in its history and was fighting to stay out of World War II. Nevertheless, Roosevelt's mind was on the peacetime to come, on this nation's posterity, and as he stood on the NIH campus he told his audience, “We cannot be a strong nation unless we are a healthy nation. And so we must recruit not only men and materials but also knowledge and science in the service of national strength. . . .The ramparts we watch must be civilian in addition to military”¹.