REMEMBERING DAVID ROSNER

On 2026-07-22, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) delivered a floor speech titled "REMEMBERING DAVID ROSNER" in the Senate.

REMEMBERING DAVID ROSNER

Congressional Record, Volume 172 Issue 120 (Wednesday, July 22, 2026) [Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 120 (Wednesday, July 22, 2026)] [Senate] [Pages S4234-S4236] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [ www.gpo.gov ] REMEMBERING DAVID ROSNER Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I won't speak long. David Rosner has died. You have probably never heard of him, but I knew him. His research, along with his colleague Gerry Markowitz, helped expose the role of the lead paint industry in poisoning millions of children. He was a great public health researcher. Here is his book with Gerry Markowitz, which I just took down from my Senate bookshelf, where I keep it: ``Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution.'' David had smarts, and he had discipline, and he had guts. The smarts made him and Gerry path-breaking researchers. The discipline made their research incontrovertible, and the guts helped him weather the response, all too common, from American industry when faced with inconvenient truths: to lie, to bully, to disparage. Well, that behavior did not defeat David. His work stands. As I said, I won't speak long. I will instead ask unanimous consent that three obituaries be printed in the Congressional Record appended to these remarks. One is his obituary in The Lancet, the distinguished medical publication. The second is a reminiscence by his professional peer Bruce Lanphear. And the last is a Substack reminiscence by his daughter Molly. David was a special man. He did special work. I was proud to have worked with him. There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows: Obituary--David Rosner (By Andrew Green) Pioneering public health historian. Born on March 13, 1047, in New York, NY, USA, he died on May 24, 2026, in New York, aged 79 years. As a leading historian of public health, David Rosner pursued ``the highest level of scholarship that he then put to work for the benefit of people who had suffered illness and death at the hands of industry'', said Amy Fairchild, Professor in the Division of Health Policy and Management at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN. Rosner helped develop and expand the field of occupational and environmental history, showing how disease and death were often foreseeable--and avoidable--by-products of industrialisation. ``What he really wanted to accomplish in labour history was to bring attention to health and the effects of working conditions on worker's health'', said Gerald Markowitz, Distinguished Professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, NY, and Rosner's long-time collaborator. ``He also really wanted to show how the workplace and the environment are crucial elements in improving public health.'' Rosner received a bachelor's degree from City College of New York, NY, in 1968 and a master's degree in public health 4 years later from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA. In that period, Rosner also worked at a hospital for developmentally challenged children in New York. ``That's really where he began to see the relationship between environmental factors and disease, because many of the children had been lead poisoned'', Markowitz said. ``That really was an important education for him about how life chances are completely altered because of housing conditions or diets or just poverty.'' Rosner completed a doctorate in the history of science at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA in 1978. 4 years later, he published his first book, A Once Charitable Enterprise, documenting how hospitals in New York had transitioned from community-based institutions to bureaucratised facilities. ``That was really a pathbreaking work that got a lot of attention'', Markowitz said. At City University Distinguished Professor, Rosner initiated and academic career ``teaching public health students to think not only about public health policy and practice and epidemiology, but to think about history'', Fairchild said. ``You have to know something about what came before you. It shapes our assumptions and sense of what's possible.'' In 1998, Rosner moved to Columbia University in New York, where he was named the Ronald H. Lauterstein Professor of Sociomedical Sciences and Professor of History. He also co- founded and co-directed the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health, which was jointly hosted by Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health. ``He was great to younger scholars and just very supportive of younger people coming into the field'', said Susan Reverby, Marion Butler McLean Professor Emerita in the History of Ideas and Professor Emerita of Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College, in Wellesley, MA. Rosner challenged the health and environmental harms caused by industry both through his scholarship and in legal settings. He would regularly testify as an expert witness on behalf of people affected by workplace and environmental hazards, including silica dust, asbestos, and lead poisoning. ``He spent all this time testifying for workers and much of that money he ploughed back into Columbia to build the history of the public health programme'', Reverby said. ``More than the content of his work on environmental and occupational exposures, he really modelled what it means to be an intellectual who contributes to our world'', said Mary Bassett, Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health in Boston, MA. With Markowitz, Rosner would write of edit several books, including Deadly Dust: Silicosis and the Politics of Occupational Disease in Twentieth Century America (1991), Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (2002), and Building the Worlds That Kill Us: Disease, Death, and Inequality in American History (2024). [[Page S4235]] Rosner, who retired from Columbia University as a Professor Emeritus of Sociomedical Sciences in 2025, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987 and was named the recipient of the 2026 Genevieve Miller Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association for the History of Medicine. He is survived by his wife, Kathlyn Conway, a psychotherapist, and their children, Zachary and Molly. ``Disease is not only a matter of bacteria and viruses, but it is produced by the social and political conditions that society makes'', Markowitz said; Rosner ``very much believed that and that is what he wanted his legacy to be, to make that known in the public health world and the broader society''. [May 25, 2026] How Rosner and Markowitz Revealed the Hidden Architecture of Disease (By Bruce Lanphear) David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz did not simply write history. Together, they changed how many of us understand the relationship between industry, disease, science, and public health. Their work became so intertwined that it is difficult to think of one without the other. Yet David's death this past week invites reflection not only on their partnership, but on the singular role he played in reshaping public health history. I had the opportunity and privilege to work with David and Jerry--they were a package deal--in the Rhode Island and California public nuisance cases against the paint and pigment manufacturers. Watching them work was to see historians operating not as distant chroniclers of the past, but as investigators reconstructing how societies normalize harm. They brought archives to life. Internal memos, trade association minutes, and forgotten correspondence became evidence not only of what industries knew, but of how uncertainty itself was cultivated and deployed. More broadly, Rosner and Markowitz helped redefine what public health history could be. Rosner and Markowitz stood at the intersection of history and public health. They understood that disease does not emerge in a vacuum. It arises from the worlds we build--our industries, our housing, our labor systems, our politics, and our willingness to accept certain harms as the price of progress. Their work on lead poisoning fundamentally reshaped the public conversation. Lead was long portrayed as an unfortunate but isolated problem affecting poor children in deteriorating housing. Rosner and Markowitz showed something much larger and more unsettling: lead poisoning was not an accident. It was the foreseeable consequence of industrial decisions, aggressive marketing, political compromise, and delayed regulation. Their landmark work, Deceit and Denial, documented how industries understood the dangers of lead long before the public did and how scientific uncertainty was often amplified to delay action. The same themes ran through their work on silica and vinyl chloride. They chronicled how workers developed silicosis, cancer, and other occupational diseases while industries debated standards, questioned evidence, and insisted more study was needed. They showed that uncertainty was not merely a scientific condition; it was a political strategy. Rosner and Markowitz read corporate archives the way epidemiologists read outbreaks: searching for patterns, timelines, concealment, and consequence. They reconstructed not only what companies knew, but when they knew it and how they responded. In doing so, they helped expose a recurring pattern in public health: the long gap between recognition of harm and willingness to act. Their work did not remain confined to universities or academic journals. It entered courtroorns, regulatory debates, and public policy battles, where it was often intensely contested precisely because it challenged powerful industries and long-standing assumptions about responsibility for disease. They also understood something profound about modern disease. Many of the illnesses surrounding us are not sudden catastrophes. They accumulate slowly across decades, hidden within the ordinary routines of industrial life. Lead in paint and gasoline. Silica in mines and factories. Vinyl chloride