Johann Peter Frank

A German physician and hygienist regarded as a founder of public health administration as a discipline in its own right. Frank's central work, the nine volume System einer vollstandigen medicinischen Polizey, A Complete System of Medical Police, begun in 1779 and completed after his death in 1827, laid out a comprehensive government role in protecting public health, covering sanitation, water supply, maternal and infant welfare, food safety and related matters, and argued that the state bore direct responsibility for the health of its population. He put these ideas into practice as director general of Vienna's principal hospital, the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, where his insistence on systematic statistical record keeping shaped hospital administration and influenced later physicians, including Ignaz Semmelweis. Frank is honored among the founders of the field on the frieze of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.