Joyce C. Lashof, doctor who broke glass ceilings, dies at 96

In Illinois, she was the first woman to head a state public health department. She later became dean of the Berkeley School of Public Health.

Dr. Joyce C. Lashof, who fought for health equity and broke down barriers as the first woman to lead a state public health department and the first to serve as dean of the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, died June 4 at an assisted living community in Berkeley. She was 96.

Her daughter, Carol Lashof, said the cause was heart failure.

Over a long time and a varied career, friends and family members said, Dr. Lashof has always prioritized the fight for social justice. In the 1960s, she founded a community health center to provide medical care in a low-income Chicago neighborhood. After her appointment as director of the Illinois Department of Public Health in 1973, the year of the Roe v. Wade of the Supreme Court codifying the constitutional right to abortion, Dr. Lashof established protocols to allow women access to safe abortion in the state, Carol Lashof said.

In the 1980s, Dr. Lashof used her powers as a prominent university administrator to organize initiatives to combat discrimination against people with AIDS and to protest against apartheid in South Africa. .

She also championed social justice outside of her professional life, leading her family on so many peace and civil rights marches in the 1960s that they came to see mass protests as “a family outing,” recalls his son, Dan. Joan Baez once performed in their living room in Chicago, the family said, for a fundraiser for the Anti-Segregation Nonviolent Student Coordinating Committee.

"Initially, his work in medicine and public health was deeply driven by a deep commitment to issues of social justice in our society," said Nancy Krieger, a professor of social epidemiology at Harvard, who has worked on the AIDS politics with Dr. Lashof as a Berkeley graduate student in the 1980s. "It included issues of racism, issues of social class, issues of gender."

After a brief tenure as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare and a longer tenure as Deputy Director of the Office of Technology Assessment, she was appointed to lead Berkeley School of Public Health in 1981. In this position, Dr. Krieger said, she was not content to limit her scope to administrative tasks.

At the height of the epidemic of AIDS in 1986, for example, she set her sights on defeating Proposition 64, a California election initiative led by far-right political agitator Lyndon LaRouche that would have imposed mass testing for AIDS and, critics feared, mass quarantines.

Dr. Lashof secured cooperation from the four schools of public health in the California university system to prepare a policy analysis of the initiative, which Dr. Krieger said was their first such joint project. The analysis, presented to the California State Assembly, demonstrated the potentially harmful effects of the measure and, Dr. Krieger said, contributed to its defeat.

Dr. Lashof's friends said she approached activism with the mind of a scientist. "It was about always wanting to bring evidence about the issues that were causing health inequities," Dr. Krieger said.

at the neighborhood level. In 1967, Dr. Lashof, then a faculty member at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, opened the Mile Square Health Center in Chicago, a community health clinic funded by the federal Equal Opportunity Office who provided medical care to a poor area of ​​the city.

"She was one of the key people who helped ensure that the health centers community health centers are federally funded and viable in this country," said Dr. Krieger.

The Mile Square Center, the nation's second-largest community health never reached the same level...