Dr. Donald Henderson was born in Lakewood, Ohio on September 7, 1928. He received his bachelor's degree from Oberlin College, his M.D. from the University of Rochester School of Medicine, and his M.P.H (Masters of Public Health) from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Henderson headed the World Health Organization's Global Smallpox Eradication Campaign beginning in 1966, which successfully saw the eradication of smallpox from the entire world by 1977. After his tenure with the WHO, Henderson became dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and acted as a senior advisor to many federal departments and commissions related to health and safety. He has received numerous honorary degrees, awards, and honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2002). In this oral history, Henderson describes his career as an epidemiologist, his relationship to Johns Hopkins, and the history of the School of Public Health. This oral history is part of the Mame Warren oral histories series.

Paul Quin is a writer and designer who graduated from Hopkins in 1965 with a degree from the Writing Seminars. Quin notes Elliot Coleman, founder of the Writing Seminars in 1947, as an early teacher. During his undergraduate years at Hopkins, Quin witnessed historical events at the school including the anti-segregation protests from 1962-1963 and when Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke on campus. In this interview, Quin talks about his early life, experiences at Hopkins, coming to terms with his identity as a gay man, life in Baltimore in the early 1960s, and the trajectory of his life in his post-Hopkins years. This oral history is part of the Hopkins Retrospective oral histories series.

Eric Noji earned his undergraduate degree from Stanford University in 1977, having majored in biochemistry, philosophy, and classics. He went on to receive his MD from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and his MPH in Epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. After spending time working as a US Park Police Ranger and marine wildlife biologist, he became an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital and a Medical Epidemiologist at the CDC, among other positions. Dr. Noji is a prominent physician in the humanitarian community, and has been awarded such honors as his election to the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academies of Science as well as his induction into the Ordre des Palmes Académiques at the rank of Chevalier. In this history, Dr. Noji discusses his education and medical career as well as his time at Johns Hopkins. This oral history is part of the Mame Warren oral histories series.

Using diagrams, Dr. Lowell J. Reed first describes the history of epidemics, the origins of disease, using measles and small pox as examples, and means of transmission. He then demonstrates the epidemic theory where St is the number of people susceptible to the disease over time multiplied by 1 minus qct (the probability of a person with the disease meeting a susceptible person) equals C t+1(cases over time). Also factored into this equation is the number of people who develop an immunity to the disease after recovering from it. The theory is then tested against experience. Dr. Reed sets up an experiment demonstrating the practical application of the theory using a model. He then discusses epidemic control focusing on isolation of people who already have the disease, and immunization of people who are susceptible to the disease.