William P. Shepard
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company
For pioneering work as an industrial health physician, educator and government advisor.
As physician, health officer, health educator and government adviser, William Shepard has established a reputation throughout the nation for constructive imagination. Each decade has seen him quietly lead voluntary and governmental agencies at local, state and national levels into new and fruitful activities.
The ten years of his chairmanship of the American Public Health Association’s committee were ones of dramatic achievement in setting sound goals for professional education of the many members of the health team. He has enlarged the function of the industrial physician from first aid to the injured to that of plant medical advisor and exponent of preventive medicine. He and his associates have provided an excellent example of a Health and Welfare Division of a great life insurance company. He is also the chairman of the Council on Industrial Health of the American Medical Association.
He has served with distinction in the Health Resources Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization and the National Advisory Committee of the Selective Service System since their inception, and so has contributed to the most effective mobilization of the nation’s health personnel.
Friend and counselor of medical societies, universities, health officials and business leaders, he has always given freely of himself, often at great personal sacrifice.
Perhaps the most outstanding characteristic of his labors has been his extraordinary ability to recognize the merit of inter-related, although sometimes overlapping and even conflicting, activities, and then, with wisdom and tact, to effect a workable creative compromise among them. In these ways he has had a powerful influence on the health of all Americans.
