Herbert Ratner

Herbert Spencer Ratner (also Herbert Albert Ratner) (May 23, 1907 – December 6, 1997), an American physician, taught and wrote on the philosophy and history of medicine and was a popular lecturer on marriage and the family. Ratner was the director of public health for the community of Oak Park, Illinois, for twenty-five years. An advocate of preventive family medicine based on natural norms, he was also a long-time proponent of informed medical consent, and played a pivotal role in the polio vaccine controversy beginning in 1955. For more than twenty-nine years Ratner was editor of Child and Family Quarterly, a paramedical journal which ran articles on the Hippocratic Oath, infant development, women’s health, and other topics related to family health.

The youngest of seven children born in New York City to Russian-Jewish immigrants Leo and Sophia “Sonia” (née Maazel), and named after the English philosopher Herbert Spencer, Ratner grew up in Manhattan. His mother Sonia, who had sung professionally as a young woman, was the sister of Isaac Maazel who was a first violinist at the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra after formerly having been concert master to the czar. Ratner's father Leo was a physician, a graduate of New York Medical College (1892). A socialist who had no use for religion, he died when Ratner was fourteen leaving him dependent on his older brothers for the financing of his education during the years of the Great Depression. These brothers were George, a dentist who was one of the first to use x-rays in dentistry; Bret, a pediatrician and immunologist who was author of a popular textbook of pediatrics; and Victor, at one time vice-president of advertising and sales promotion for CBS. Two other siblings Mary and Walter died in early childhood. A remaining sister Helen died in 1938 of tuberculosis after a lengthy illness.

After attending Los Angeles Public High School in California his freshman year and DeWitt Clinton Public High School in New York the remaining three years, Ratner went on to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. There he received the B.A. degree in 1929, completed his medical studies in 1934, and received the M.D. degree in 1935. While in Ann Arbor he married fellow medical student Dorothy Smith who received the M.D. degree in 1934 after having attended public high school in Swanton, Ohio and after having received the B.A. degree at Toledo University. She was born in Sylvania Township, Lucas County, Ohio, the daughter of a farm family of twelve children and the granddaughter of Yankee and German-American settlers in the county.

...
Wikipedia