Recently, we lost a very dear friend and colleague. In 1984, Dr. Joyce Lashof, then dean of the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, was part of a small group of people who helped create the Wellness Letter. Because this was the very first time such a public/private partnership had ever been proposed there, it took enormous effort on her part to convince the university to embrace the idea. Joyce promised she would review every word of content and ensure that we never published anything that wasn’t fully researched and scientifically based.
She kept that promise, serving on the editorial board for nearly 33 years and, in her diligence, setting the standard for everyone who worked on the publication. All in all, she devoted about a third of her life to our mission, during which time she reviewed more than 400 issues of the Wellness Letter and, according to our rough estimates, spent the equivalent of some 200 days attending our monthly editorial board meetings—all unpaid, we should add.
Joyce stepped down from her active role with the Wellness Letter in 2017 at the age of 90. But her legacy continued: As dean, she had established a special fund composed of the royalties received from the Wellness Letter, which was earmarked for support of graduate students in the School of Public Health. Over the years, hundreds of students have benefited from this funding and are now serving in vital positions around the world in the field of public health.
While we were lucky enough to have had Joyce with us at the Wellness Letter all those years, we also want to note that she was the first woman to be appointed dean of a professional school and the first woman to head a state department of public health during her prior years in Illinois. She was a tireless advocate for the development of community-based health centers across the country and a leader of the American Public Health Association. In 1995, President Clinton appointed her to chair the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses, and from 2000 to 2001, she headed a committee on the Early Detection of Breast Cancer for the Institute of Medicine.
Joyce died in June at the age of 96. All of us who knew her personally will miss her friendship and her generosity, but the Wellness Letter and the world of public health will forever be grateful for her passion, her insight, her wisdom, and her determination to always “do well by doing good.”
For more about the pioneering work of Dr. Lashof, you can read this essay from the Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health.
