As a child of parents who eked out a living in part by peeling potatoes and boiling borscht at resorts in New York State’s Catskill Mountains, Phil Brown grew up with a natural empathy for people who didn’t have much. He spent his childhood summers busing tables in the vacation area’s lesser hotels. In winter his family would relocate to Florida, where his parents rented furnished apartments and worked in restaurants while Brown attended school.
Today Brown is a leading sociologist in the field of environmental health. After earning a doctorate in sociology at Brandeis University in 1979, he embarked on a career as an academic, soon joining the sociology department at Brown University. Although his focus was originally on mental health, environmental disasters impacting low-income communities, which often experienced far-reaching medical problems from exposure to toxins, would become his calling. In 1984 Brown’s affinity for the working class took hold again when he arrived in the town of Woburn, Massachusetts, 12 miles north of Boston, along with a scientific team looking into an alarmingly high rate of leukemia in both children and adults: 19 cases in one decade, with only two survivors. The community’s efforts to find the cause and its lawsuit against corporate giants W. R. Grace and Beatrice Foods were later detailed in Jonathan Harr’s book A Civil Action and a movie of the same name.
The Woburn residents contended that chemicals from the factories had contaminated their water supply and caused the leukemia. Their grassroots efforts, led initially by a local mother whose son was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia, reminded Brown of the community effort at New York’s Love Canal, whose residents, having assessed their own chemical contamination, challenged the government and the corporations they held responsible. It was an effort for which Brown coined the phrase “popular epidemiology.”
A longtime professor of medical and environmental sociology at Brown University, Brown has championed the collaboration between impacted citizens and the scientific community. The effort made by the community of Woburn was chronicled in No Safe Place, the critically acclaimed book he coauthored with Edwin Mikkelsen.
We spoke with Phil Brown recently at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
What is popular epidemiology?
It’s where laypeople work together with scientists to look at the distribution and causes of illnesses—because otherwise a lot of those things would never even be looked at.
Was popular epidemiology considered fringe at first?
Certainly by other scientists. When the scientists involved at Woburn published their work, they got a lot of criticism because people felt that they were relying on anecdotal information. They were in particular criticized for using residents to do some of the interviewing. But the scientists couldn’t have done it without them because they didn’t have a budget.
So they recruited the Woburn residents and trained them to make sure they would avoid any bias. They were trying to find a whole lot of information about the residents’ health, and they were also using water models to see how the water flowed—which houses got more water, which houses got less. Ultimately people who got more water were more likely to have leukemia.
What was it like to interview the residents?
These people were very angry. I mean, it was 20 years from the time that they first discovered the contamination until [the court case] finally ended. The main effect of the chemicals was childhood leukemia. And we interviewed some who had already lost their children. It was really, really hard. We would come out of there wiped out. I had never really had that experience before, scientifically talking to people who had lost their kids. It was a very hard thing.
So we did these interviews, and Mikkelsen and I wrote No Safe Place. It was pretty well received, in The New York Times Book Review, in Nature and Science. It’s still cited today as a key work in the field.
