In 1953, the first class of CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), the class of 1951, gave its director, Alexander D. Langmuir, two well-worn leather shoe soles. They stood for what EIS officers did: shoe-leather epidemiology — going out to investigate outbreaks in person rather than relying on others' reports. Langmuir hung the plaque on his office wall, and a tradition began. Class after class followed with a gift of its own, usually presented at another tradition, the EIS skit.
The class of 1951's gift: two leather soles. Credit: David J. Sencer CDC Museum.
A tradition that nearly ended
The class of 1951 had 23 officers — 22 physicians and a sanitary engineer — and one of them designed a logo that is still the EIS symbol: a shoe sole with a hole worn through it, over the Earth. The skit has been held every year except 1955, when the EIS conference was cancelled so officers could investigate contaminated polio vaccine — the Cutter incident, which first put CDC and EIS in the national spotlight.
The gifts fared worse. In the 1980s the director ran out of wall space, and the plaques went into Philip Brachman's attic. From 1989, when for several months there was no permanent director of epidemiology, no gifts were presented. The class of 2001 revived the tradition in 2003, and in 2004 the gifts were donated to the CDC Museum.
The gifts as a history of CDC
Each gift is an in-joke about the class's two years, and together they read as a history of the agency:
| Class | Gift | What it recalled |
|---|---|---|
| 1952 | a gift about the 1953 national evaluation of gamma globulin against polio | months of training and fieldwork that showed it did not work |
| 1963 | a mock Monopoly board | each property named for a place the class investigated an epidemic |
| 1967 | a cartoon of Langmuir with a jet vaccinator | the launch of the national measles immunization program, the "Pontiac" outbreak among Michigan health department employees, and the Hong Kong influenza pandemic |
| 1972 | a parody of the Great Seal, its stripes turned into an epidemic curve | the Epidemiology Program's upgrade to a Bureau |
| 1974 | the "Silver Alex": shoes with the shoe-leather hole, painted silver | the EIS's 25th anniversary in 1976 |
| 1975 | "Phillie's Angels" | a triple pun on the Legionnaires' outbreak in Philadelphia after the 1976 bicentennial, director Phil Brachman and Charlie's Angels |
| 1983 | a spoof MMWR reporting no smallpox cases in week 4,652 after eradication | CDC "resting on its laurels"; the Latin caption means "Two years with Carl, a lifetime with Hygeia" |
| 1985 | a personal computer | the class beta-tested the first MS-DOS version of Epi Info |
| 1988 | the "HHS Pinafore" cruise ship collage | cruise ship outbreaks the class helped investigate |
| 2001 | a red, white and blue quilt, stitched in quilting-bee evenings | a year that deeply affected the class and the nation |
| 2008 | a Commissioned Corps sword, with the EIS chief "knighted" on stage | a symbol that came up throughout the class's two years |
The class of 1974's "Silver Alex," honoring EIS founder Alex Langmuir. Credit: David J. Sencer CDC Museum.
A living record
The stories behind many gifts come from the officers themselves, and some are missing; the museum asks EIS graduates to help fill in the gaps. Together they show the lighter side of the EIS experience — the humor that bonds officers within each class and across the decades.
Sources
Based on "EIS Class Gifts" from the David J. Sencer CDC Museum, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a work of the United States government in the public domain, drawing on recollections submitted by EIS graduates.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.cdc.gov
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