Calvin W. Schwabe was born on March 15, 1927, in Newark, New Jersey to Calvin W. Schwabe Sr. and Marie (Hassfeld) Schwabe. He graduated in l948 with a B.S. in biology (honors), from Virginia Polytechnic Institute. While attending graduate school at the University of Hawaii, from which he received a M.S. in zoology in 1950, he met and subsequently married the former Gwendolyn Joyce Thompson. In 1954 Dr. Schwabe was awarded the D.V.M. degree (highest honors) from Auburn University and, in 1955, an M.P.H. degree in tropical pubic health from Harvard University. His terminal Sc.D. degree in parasitology-tropical public health was awarded by Harvard in 1956.
From l956 until l966 Dr. Schwabe was a member of the medical and public health faculties of the American University of Beirut, where he developed a significant research program on hydatid disease and other parasitic zoonoses, founded a joint Department of Tropical Health within those two faculties in l957, and a Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics within the School of Public Health in l962. Beginning in l960 he served as a consultant to the World Health Organization, developing its collaborative global program on hydatid disease research and control. From l964-l966, on leave of absence from Beirut, he directed that and several other parasitic diseases programs at the WHO Secretariat in Geneva, and has remained an active consultant and expert committee member to WHO since then in the areas of zoonoses and veterinary public health.
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, activities with significant international dimensions, and served as Professor of Epidemiology within that campus' veterinary and medical schools (as well as within the medical school and Hooper Foundation for Medical Research of the University of California, San Francisco) until his retirement in l99l.
In addition to his research and control efforts against parasitic zoonoses, Dr. Schwabe has been throughout his career a leading worker more generally 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 ( Cattle, Priests and Progress in Medicine ) were the first attempt to document historically the research dimension specifically of veterinary medicine's contributions to human medicine and to suggest how that interaction might develop in the future. In a further series of papers undertaken through his association with the Agricultural History Center at UC Davis, Dr. Schwabe has examined in greater detail 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. Through a combination of those and related interests, 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. His other books include What Should a Veterinarian Do? and Unmentionable Cuisine, a popular examination of the contributions made by food prejudices and ignorance to world food-population imbalance.
From the guide to the Calvin Walter Schwabe Papers, 1944-1992, (History of Medicine Division. National Library of Medicine)
