Francis Carter Wood and the birth of population-based cancer surveillance.

The founding of the National Cancer Institute in 1937 was attended by the formation of the National Advisory Council on Cancer. A seminal action by this Council was the funding of the First National Cancer Survey, the first population-based cancer surveillance activity of the federal government. Francis Carter Wood, distinguished cancer researcher and editor of the American Journal of Cancer (predecessor to Cancer Research), was a member of that Council, through which he was a prime mover in the funding of this survey.

Finding our roots: early population-based cancer registration, 1925.

In 1925, the American Public Health Association Committee on Control of Cancer presented the results of its 1924-1925 operations at the association's annual meeting. The Committee evaluated the issue of cancer surveillance, both active and passive, and concluded that the probity of the cancer incidence data, however useful it might be, was outweighed by the likely cost. The reasoning provided by the Committee suggests a sophisticated understanding of many aspects of cancer epidemiology often thought to be a post-World War II development.

Historical vignette: Leonard T. Kurland, FACE (1921-2001), the rise of neuroepidemiology, and the Rochester Epidemiology Project.

The creation of the field of neuroepidemiology was one of the two principal professional achievements of the American College of Epidemiology Fellow Leonard T. Kurland (1921-2001), the other being the establishment of the Rochester Project. In the former, Kurland established the role of the neuroepidemiologists in the development of the corpus of knowledge needed to control and prevent the occurrence of neurological conditions.