David Rosner, my doctoral advisor, died this past weekend. The world is a little different now.
Often, it seems like there is no one in the world of public health who didn’t know David (and adore him). If his name is new to you, his influence probably isn’t — for one thing, it’s sitting at the core of what P-SNAP is all about. Let me tell you some things.
David was the co-creator and director of the Center for History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University. When I met him he was famous for a lot of things, but I understood his work only in the fuzzy way of a 24 year old with an indistinct passion for social justice and some ideas about going to graduate school to fix the world. The Center was where people studied history to inform policy. David and the other faculty there spoke and wrote with clarity, conviction, and a wisdom full of nuance and understanding. I signed on.
David’s books were already impactful. They were about the industrial diseases that ground strong, hardworking people into debilitated, dead people. With titles like Lead Wars and Deadly Dust, they chronicled the fate of workers exposed to asbestos, lead, and synthetic chemicals, and the cover-ups and legal dodges of the companies that trafficked in those materials. The books were “social histories,” that described the tributaries of ideas and power that explained how such things were allowable, socially and politically, if not always by law. They explained how things came to be this way.
And they provided evidence. David and his co-writer, Jerry Markowitz, were adroit at fishing memos out of archives. They excelled at identifying correspondence that demonstrated corporate knowledge of extraordinary harm, and at exposing company efforts to suppress or deflect attention from these truths. “Rosner and Markowitz read corporate archives the way epidemiologists read outbreaks,” observes Bruce Lanphear, “searching for patterns, timelines, concealment, and consequence. They reconstructed not only what companies knew, but when they knew it and how they responded.”
Their diligence made for good history, but it also made for good litigation. Soon they were called on by law offices, then deposed as expert witnesses. David made wry comments about the unexpected uptick in book sales, as law firms ordered stacks of his “little manuscript” about lead poisoning and built the case that would eventually hold Sherwin Williams and other pigment manufacturers accountable for $2-4 billion of lead paint abatement in Rhode Island. A win!
But not for long. The state supreme court later overturned the verdict, stating that public nuisance law on which the case had been carried forward could not be used to hold the manufacturers liable.
The grief that lingered in David’s eyes when decisions like that came down also smoldered with anger. And resolve.
I saw that look again and again as the years ticked by — and not because David was an angry person. To the contrary, one of the most common words used to describe him would be “warm” (though I prefer “avuncular;” my wedding photographer even mistook him for my father). The Center itself was distinctly warm. David modeled collaboration. He was cheerful and funny, and pleasantly disdainful of historians who worked in competitive isolation to write the “perfect book.” What would that be for? The point wasn’t to get tenure, it was to do something valuable.
Which he continued to do. The expert testimony continued, as did the teaching and writing, and the interviews. I heard David and Jerry on the radio, saw their op-eds in the Times, saw their discussions with Bill Moyers, their appearances in documentaries. They digitized the documents pried loose from industry through lawsuits and uploaded them to a database, Toxic Docs, to be accessed by anyone, anytime. David and Jerry made themselves heard, and they put forward the powerful message that history matters because it illuminates choices — “choices,” notes Bruce Lanphear, “made differently in the future if we [a]re willing to learn from the past.”
David continued to engage with the courts until the final weeks of his life. As recently as March 25, 2026, his and Jerry’s work prompted the Lancet to retract a 1977 editorial arguing that talcum powder (which contains asbestos) posed no serious health risk. David never stopped. Even so, he was distressed this past year about the need to do more, now and especially into the future. Who would step directly into these fights? Who would come forward to be an expert witness? I learned this from Jerry, who I encountered at the shiva wearing a “Good Trouble” cap, and the bewilderment of a person who has lost an intellectual soulmate.
Who indeed? I never felt that I had managed to do David proud. Interestingly, in the wake of his death, I am hearing other former students say the same thing, in the same words. This is not because David was critical of us (he never was, even when he probably should have been). Rather, I think it is because we understood as his students how badly there need to be more rockstars in the fight. Indisputably, David was a rockstar. How does one measure up?
But here’s the thing: all of David’s former students are in interesting and useful places now. (Social media was useful this week, and we found each other — we are journalists, academics, researchers, organizers, and more.) But the legacy is running down through P-SNAP, too. Some of us in the P-SNAP network served as expert witnesses on a plastics case this year. Many published op-eds. Some were interviewed on the radio (and many in podcasts), some popped up in documentaries, many gave legislative testimony. We are stepping forward into the fight.
The sadness of David’s shiva reminded me of the final pages of Charlotte’s Web. I cannot reckon with his absence yet, and I thought of the passage in which Wilbur stands in the yard Charlotte once inhabited, feeling the senselessness of the loss. But then he also feels her legacy.
“When [Wilbur] awoke it was late afternoon. He looked at the egg sac. It was empty. He looked into the air… Then he walked drearily into the doorway, where Charlotte’s web used to be. He was standing there, thinking of her, when he heard a small voice.”
“Salutations!” it said. “I’m up here.”
“So am I,” said another tiny voice.
“So am I,” said a third voice…
“Wilbur looked up. At the top of the doorway three small webs were being constructed. On each web, working busily, was one of Charlotte’s daughters.”
The author of Charlotte’s Web, you may recall, was that master of language and communication, EB White. This was never a story about a spider in a barnyard, at least not really. It was about friendship and inspiration, and the power of messaging. And at the very last it was about legacy.
In spite of our immediate grief, it is clear that David had many “daughters,” who at this point have ballooned to outposts all over the world, where they are building fabulous webs. I submit that P-SNAP is part of that constellation.
I’ll leave the last word, for now, to EB White, since David was about the cleverest and most compassionate spider many of us will ever know — and canny with the written word.
“Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of them ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”
Goodbye for now, David.