Frank G. Boudreau
Milbank Memorial Fund
For promoting better mental health, good nutrition, and improved housing.
For 45 years, Frank Boudreau has quietly and effectively played a vital role in developing public health throughout the world. Beginning as pathologist and an epidemiologist, he has stressed a proper diagnosis of problems and long-term perspectives in seeking solutions. Throughout his 14 years in the Ohio State Department of Health, 11 years in the League of Nations (where he became director of the Health Section) and 20 years as the guiding genius of the Milbank Memorial Fund, his wisdom has attracted those who worked in the special fields he tilled so productively—nutrition, mental health, population problems, housing, and local health services. He listened with care to the smallest problem—but promptly nudged the questioner into seeing it in a wider perspective.
He never lost sight of the value of local health services, but his wider contributions are at the national and international levels. He was chairman of the US Food and Nutrition Board through difficult wartime years. In postwar years he was an important factor in developing both the Food and Agriculture Organization, the latter resting well on the base he himself had constructed two decades previously.
Frank Boudreau is one of the world's vital but unassuming servants of the common good.
