Kate Shumate (left), College of Public Health alumna, was presented the William R. Gemma Distinguished Memorial Award at the College of Public Health's Alumni Society's annual meeting on Sept. 7 by Amy Wermert, society president.
The award honors William R. Gemma, who received a Ph.D. in Preventative Medicine from The Ohio State University in 1972, and devoted his career to improving emergency medical services. Gemma also served as the first president of the Alumni Society.
The College of Public Health annually presents the award to alumni who make significant contributions to the field of preventative medicine and public health.
Shumate accepted the award with the following speech:
When I was a kid, my dad was the director of the Water Resources Center at Ohio State. There are four things about this that are memorable to me:
1. His office always smelled like raw sewage;
2. Our family slides (yes, slides) were of pictures of acid mine drainage — images of nice copper colored water and not too many people;
3. With the clever use of chemical titration, he had me convinced that he could turn water into wine;
4. I met a lot of graduate students.
There was one graduate student up at Put-in-Bay, where we lived, who was studying nematods in fish. She let me help with dissecting and sexing fish and pulling out the little red worms. I got to write the little numbers in the book for each specimen and make the all the notations. Inspired as only a 12 year old can be by the internal working of fish, I wrote away to the International Society of Parisitologists. In response, I received the best brochure ever! This brochure was actually a little booklet with great pictures of the damage caused by parasites. Personally, the best ones were the elephantiasis pictures. There was a new boy in seventh grade who sat next to me on the bus. I showed him my booklet and he was grossed out. I didn’t think a boy would react that way.
As we were growing up, my dad told stories of Paul Revere and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and said that he hoped us kids would do the right thing when faced with a question of what we were called upon to do. I was bereft as we had already landed on the moon and explored most of the frontiers. I couldn’t imagine anything new to explore.
My dad died during my senior year of high school as the result of a brain tumor. I had planned to go into nursing, but after my experience of dad’s illness, I decided to pursue a more logical course, the cop out of students everywhere — a degree in English. (I actually pursued interests in folklore, which is actually cultural anthropology, which is actually public health!) And then, I noticed that many of my friends had started to die. Young men, my peers, were getting sick and wasting away.
I first volunteered and then got a job working in HIV. One of my early clients had been one of my dad’s grad students from China. Another man I cared for was a fashion model in New York who moved back to Columbus to die — but long before that he had sat next to me on the bus to seventh grade and had been disgusted by my interest in pathogens.
I didn’t pursue a degree in public health first and then search for a job, I worked in HIV and realized that I needed some expertise if I was to be effective. OSU offered the weekend MPH program and I signed up. This was in the era when people would shake my hand and then wipe their hand off on their clothing after touching me. I worked in HIV before AZT.
I would never have completed my MPH if it hadn’t been for Judy Dawson, who pretty much held me up through the entire process. OSU may not realize what a gem they have in Judy when it comes to students like me who are admittedly bright, but just a bit scattered. And in a moment of insanity, I decided to select a thesis option so I could pursue a PhD at some future date. If Randy Love had not been there, throughout my career in HIV, but also in my role as a student in the then named College of Medicine and Public Health, I would have gone belly up like a Lake Erie bass.
I need to thank Marty Keller who made public health come to life in his inimitable elvin way. Gil Nestel who actually made economics interesting, Dick Lanese, Gary Stoner, and so many other professors who fascinated me while making public health seem like the most honorable of careers.
I have been able to pursue the work I love with the help of those who believed in me. My mom who wasn’t freaked out by AIDS even at a time when I am sure her peers had many questions—she trusted my judgment. There were also my fellow students, Krista Wasowski who is now a county health commissioner and Hilton De Silva, a physician who is treating native tribes in the Amazon, and others whose careers sound so exciting to me.
It is great that students at OSU can pursue degrees in Public Health before entering the field, rather than after, when they are in the thick of an epidemic and realize they have few tools on which they can rely. For those of you who are students, I am living proof that you can do meaningful work in public health without ever having to do a T-test professionally. To tell you the truth, I would like to pursue a doctorate in public health at OSU, but there is the small matter of the GRE. It is a kick to take it in your twenties or thirties, but when you reach the era of your decreptitude, it is daunting. So I will likely remain an MPH for the balance of my career.
HIV has changed so much from when I started. To be sure, people still die every single day. As Dr. Mike Para has said, we live in a country that has 90% of the resources to deal with AIDS, but 93% of the people with HIV don’t live here. HIV is devastating the African American community in the US and while we have the necessary tools, in this political climate, I am not sure that we have the will. When abstinence-only programs are encouraged by our president, it takes guts for a governor to turn the money back to the feds.
Even OSU doesn’t offer courses in how to deal with the politics of public health; how to work within the insidious systems that seem to be in direct opposition to the well being of those whom we serve. We are often torn between kissing the feet of whichever idol has been elected to public office while still trying to remember the fundamental values that drew us in to this work in the first place.
And I guess that is, in essence, what public health is all about. You stand up for what is right and true despite political opinion or the popularity of what you need to say. I have often said that we have moved well beyond the time when the only real requirement to work in HIV is the ability to say the word “penis” in front of a large group of people. A career in public health may mean that you find yourself saying all sorts of words that you never imagined would be necessary. Public Health IS the next frontier and, at the end of the day, what we do is honorable and in furtherance of the collective good. I can’t imagine a higher calling and I think my dad would have agreed.
