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.
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.
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.
Before leaving the University of Michigan with Dorothy for a year in New York to be near his mother while his sister was dying, Ratner became interested in the philosophy and history of medicine.
There he did research in the history of medicine as an assistant to Mortimer Adler, the founder of the Great Books Program, with whom he shared an office.
In 1949 Ratner accepted the position of full-time director of public health in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, an appointment he held until 1974.
As director of public health Ratner also became a pioneer in the field of informed medical consent when he held full disclosure sessions on polio vaccine for the parents of young children in his community.
Under his directorship Oak Park was the only community in the state of Illinois to delay participation in the 1955 Salk Polio Vaccine Program – sponsored by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis for first- and second-grade school children – in order that informed-medical-consent sessions for parents could be scheduled beforehand by the health department.
)[8] In the spring of 1955 Ratner had risked his job in order to schedule informed consent meetings in his community for the parents of the children eligible to receive the Salk vaccine.
[10] Knowing that this pre-season outbreak of polio in the western states was an indication that unknown amounts of live polio virus had remained in the purportedly killed-virus Salk vaccine and having learned also of similar pre-season cases of polio in children in the Chicago area inoculated with vaccine from the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical house, Ratner brought home a small cardboard box of unused Salk vaccine manufactured by that company and placed it in his refrigerator planning to analyze it for live virus.
[11] In the meantime the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and the government health agencies blamed the California pharmaceutical house Cutter Laboratories for having improperly prepared the polio vaccine that had been used in the western states.
[12] In 1960 Ratner learned that a government researcher Dr. Bernice Eddy had discovered evidence of a cancer-causing agent that she described as a vacuolating virus in the Salk vaccine rhesus-monkey-kidney culture medium.
Dr. Ben Sweet working under Dr. Maurice Hilleman at Merck observed a similar agent in the same kind of medium that they were using to develop a vaccine for adenovirus.
[15] The box of 1955 Salk polio vaccine that Dr. Ratner had brought to his home in 1961 when the Oak Park health department moved to new quarters remained in a refrigerator in his basement for more than forty years.
One of these researchers was Dr. Michele Carbone Archived 2012-03-14 at the Wayback Machine, a molecular pathologist of Italian birth and education, then working at the University of Chicago.
In January, 1997, at the age of 89, Ratner traveled to Bethesda, Maryland to attend a workshop of the National Institutes of Health entitled Simian Virus 40: A Possible Human Polyomavirus.
The Salk polio vaccine controversy, however, was not Ratner’s chief interest during his professional career but rather a matter he happened upon in the course of his health department duties.
Ratner continued to be professionally active until a few days before his death at age 90 on December 6, 1997, in Cleveland, Ohio, where he had been visiting a daughter.
“The devil’s advocate and the Salk vaccine program: A contribution toward an objective evaluation,” The Bulletin of the American Association of Public Health Physicians 2 (5): 3–8, November; 2 (6): 5–8, December.
“The public health aspects of breast feeding.” Section of Pediatrics, June 25, 107th Annual Meeting of the American Medical Association, San Francisco, California.
Edited from a transcript of a panel discussion presented before the Section on Preventive Medicine and Public Health at the 120th annual meeting of the Illinois State Medical Society in Chicago, May 26, 1960.
“Benjamin Rush and Daniel Drake: Contrasting forerunners of contemporary American medicine.” 3rd Annual Arthur Rochford McComas Medical History Lecture, University of Missouri School of Medicine, Columbia, May 11.
“The Infant as a Human Being,” Adapted from the keynote address at the American Montessori Society Second Annual Seminar, Chicago, June 14.
A commentary on a famous text of William Harvey, M.D.” 5th Annual Victor Robinson Lecture on Medical History, Temple University School of Medicine, Philadelphia, December 18.
2), Hearings before the Subcommittee on Monopoly of the Select Committee on Small Business, United States Senate, February 24, 25, March 3, 4, 1970.
Chapel Hill, North Carolina: International Association of Parents & Professionals for Safe Alternatives in Childbirth (NAPSAC).
“Nature: Mother, Teacher and Vicar General.” Cardinal Wright Award Lecture, Eighth Convention of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, Chicago, September 29.
“The 1955 Salk polio vaccine and the 1957-1961 Niles leukemia cluster: A flawed investigation by the U.S. Public Health Service.” H. Dietz, editor.