Lewis Hackett

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Lewis Wendell Hackett (1884-1962) was an American doctor who fought malaria in many countries, including Italy, Albania, and South America. He graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1913 and joined the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Division, working mainly from 1914 to 1924 in Central America. In 1924 he moved to Italy, where he worked with Alberto Missiroli at the Laboratory of Public Health in Rome. They focused on preventing malaria by controlling mosquitoes. With Bartholomew Gosio, they founded the School of Malariology in Nettuno and began testing DDT against Anopheles mosquitoes. In 1925 Hackett and Missiroli, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, helped start the Istituto Superiore di Sanità. Hackett and Frederick W. Knipe led malaria work in Albania, where British engineer Betty Lindsay worked until 1939. In 1940, with World War II underway, Hackett left Italy for South America, where he stayed until 1949. Over his career he worked in seventeen countries. He was the first editor of the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene when it began in 1952 and served as president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH) in 1959. He received the Walter Reed Medal from ASTMH in 1953.