George Wills Comstock

The Baltimore Sun

Dr. George Wills Comstock, an internationally known tuberculosis researcher and professor of epidemiology who established and headed the former Johns Hopkins Training Center for Public Health Research and Prevention in Hagerstown for 40 years, died Sunday of prostate cancer at his Smithsburg home. He was 92.

Throughout his life, Dr. Comstock sought to inspire his students and colleagues with words that Horace Mann, educator and abolitionist, spoke in his 1859 commencement address at Antioch College: "I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words: Be ashamed to die before you have won some victory for humanity."

"He was a wonderful human being who lived Horace Mann's words. He cared about his students, colleagues and people," said Dr. Michael J. Klag, dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "He could reach from the ivory tower to the remotest Alaska village's inhabitants. He was a bridge builder."

Dr. Klag was earning a master's degree in public health at what is now the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health when he met Dr. Comstock in 1984.

"George was one of my mentors, and I found he epitomized the drive for excellence that we all share. He had a demanding intellectual rigor, and he pushed his students," Dr. Klag said yesterday. "He demanded excellence of his students and of himself and was a man of unblinking integrity."

He recalled walking up six flights with Dr. Comstock to his sixth-floor office - "He liked pushing people that way, too" - and seeing an ancient Smith-Corona typewriter that dated to the 1930s on the desk.

"He liked anachronistic things," Dr. Klag said.

Dr. Comstock, who was a captain in the U.S. Public Health Service for 20 years and taught at the Johns Hopkins University for more than 40 years, was born and raised in Niagara Falls, N.Y., the son of a metallurgical engineer.

He earned a bachelor's degree with honors in biology and chemistry in 1937 from Antioch College. In 1941, he earned a medical degree from Harvard Medical School, and in 1951 a master's degree in public health from the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

In 1956, he earned a doctorate of public health in epidemiology from what was then the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health.

After working for Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company, Dr. Comstock began his career in public health in 1942 as a commissioned officer with the U.S. Public Health Service.

At the end of World War II, he was assigned by the PHS to its newly created tuberculosis division in Columbus, Ga., where between 1947 and 1951, he conducted the first trials of the BCG vaccine for tuberculosis in Georgia and Alabama.

The trials revealed that the vaccine was largely ineffective against TB, which led federal public health officials to decide against vaccinating children in the United States with BCG.

Dr. Comstock "single-handedly stopped the use of BCG, which always resulted in a positive test afterward, and it was ineffective," said his wife of six years, the former Emma Lou Davis, in an interview with The Herald-Mail of Hagerstown on Monday.

When Dr. Comstock began conducting research in Bethel, Alaska, in 1957, one of every 30 Alaska natives was in a TB hospital.

His work there resulted in the effectiveness of using isoniazid, an antibiotic, in preventing tuberculosis. Data he had accumulated during his Alaskan research were still being used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta when the agency updated its treatment guidelines for latent tuberculosis in 2000.

"He was a pioneer in the field of TB research, and this was a seminal contribution," Dr. Klag said.

In 1962, when he retired from the Public Health Service, he joined the faculty of the department of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins and was founding director of the Johns Hopkins Training Center for Public Health Research.

At the center - which was renamed in his honor in 2005 and is an important training ground for epidemiology students from around the world - he oversaw numerous community-based studies for four decades on cancer, heart disease and eye disease.

A modest man, Dr. Comstock was fond of saying of his successes, "I've been lucky all my life."

"George had a remarkably long career which had multiple phases from the days when there was no treatment for TB and at the same time made major contributions in cancer and cardiovascular research," said Dr. Jonathan Samet, professor and chairman of the department of epidemiology at the Bloomberg School and director of the Institute for Global Tobacco Control.

"He was a champion of work based in communities and made sure his results benefited those communities," he said.

"He used his TB research as a model for his cardiovascular research and applied this to other chronic diseases," Dr. Klag said.

During his long career, Dr. Comstock had written hundreds of scientific papers and received many awards for his work.

Though he retired in 2003, he continued teaching courses on the epidemiologic basis for tuberculosis control, and reviewing articles and chapters for books.

Another passion in his life was Baroque and Renaissance music, which he played on a recorder and bassoon. He was a co-founder of the Elizabeth Towne Consort in 1965 and the Washington County Museum Recorder Consort in 1979.

"He used to say that he had three goals in life and had managed to 'never write a book and or been a dean or a department chairman,'" his wife said.

Reflecting on his life in a 2003 interview with Epidemiology, Dr. Comstock said, "I can't think of doing anything else that would have been more rewarding or fun."

His wife of 61 years, the former Margaret Karr, died in 2000.

A memorial service will be at 3 p.m. July 28 at Rest Haven Funeral Chapel, 1601 Pennsylvania Ave., Hagerstown.

Also surviving are two sons, Dr. Gordon F. Comstock of Arcade, N.Y., and Dr. Lloyd K. Comstock of Chapel Hill, N.C.; a daughter, Dr. Martha Wills Comstock Williams of Marietta, Ga.; a stepson, Jonathan W. Davis of Lexington, Okla.; a stepdaughter, Anna L. Davis of Reisterstown; and seven grandchildren.

fred.rasmussen@baltsun.com

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