William F. Snow

Who was William F. Snow?

William Freeman Snow was born in 1874. After graduating B.A. in chemistry at Stanford University and taking later the M.A. in physiology, he proceeded M.D. in 1900. Subsequently he studied at Johns Hopkins and other institutions in the U.S.A. and abroad. He soon joined the teaching staff of Stanford University and from 19021 to 1919 was professor of preventive medicine there; from 1908 to 1914 he was also State health officer for California. In these offices he became known as a man of energy, tact, and wisdom, and in 1913 he was persuaded to undertake the direction of the newly formed American Social Hygiene Association. This organization ... owes its origin to such men as President Emeritus Charles W. Eliot, of Harvard, and Dr. Prince Morrow, of New York, who were then the leaders of organizations trying to promote sex hygiene, and to President David Starr Jordan, of Stanford University, who headed a movement against commercialized prostitution. These and others, seeing the need for a voluntary agency with the broadest possible approach to the problems of social hygiene, merged several existing societies together to form the A.S.H.A.