Schwabe, Calvin W

Calvin W. Schwabe (b. 1927) married Gwendolyn Thompson in 1951. In 1954, the Schwabes joined the Society of Friends. Calvin Schwabe, a veterinarian and public health scientist, was a member of the medical and public health faculties of the American University of Beruit from 1956-1966, and he served as a consultant to the World Health Organization beginning in 1960.

In l966, Dr. Schwabe established the first department and graduate program in epidemiology within a school of veterinary medicine at the University of California, Davis, and served as Professor of Epidemiology within the veterinary and medical schools (as well as within the medical school at the University of California, San Francisco) until l99l. In addition to his research and control efforts against parasitic zoonoses, Dr. Schwabe has been a leading worker at the interface of human and veterinary medicine. The three editions of his Veterinary Medicine and Human Health remain the only comprehensive treatment of that overall subject and his Spink Lectures on Comparative Medicine were the first attempt to document historically the research dimension of veterinary medicine's contributions to human medicine. Through the Agricultural History Center at UC Davis, Dr. Schwabe has examined the beginning emergence, in association with other man-animal relationships, of that comparative analogical approach to biomedical unknowns within ancient Egypt, especially in connection with the Egyptian religious rites of bull sacrifice. Dr. Schwabe's Epidemiology in Veterinary Practice (with Riemann and Franti) was the first extensive treatment of that field within veterinary medicine, as well as the first epidemiology textbook to draw upon all three of epidemiology's developmental avenues: disease intelligence, medical ecology and quantitative analyses. A further focus of Professor Schwabe's activities has concerned health, food and other aspects of development with the Third World, especially among its largely neglected nomadic and other pastoral peoples.