John Murray Last OC (September 22, 1926 - September 11, 2019) was a preeminent Canadian public health scholar, prolific author, scientist and teacher whose reference texts are used by schools of public health as well as community medicine and epidemiology practitioners throughout the world.
[1] Born in Australia in 1926, John Last obtained his MB BS in 1949 and his MD (by thesis) in 1968, from the University of Adelaide.
[11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] Perhaps his most enduring contribution to the health care research literature of the 1960s was a description of the "iceberg": a common phenomenon in the natural history of disease where only a relatively small proportion of cases of a given disease, "the tip of the iceberg", comes to the attention of the health care system.
[19] This contribution (including a table on clinical and subclinical disease) was incorporated (and duly referenced) by Jerry Morris, a long-standing colleague of Last, in his textbook on Uses of Epidemiology.
[27] He made numerous contributions to the public health reference literature, especially in the capacity of a scientific editor.
[30][31] This dictionary has been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Persian, Serbian, Slovakian, Russian and Ukrainian.
We must be prepared to defend our decisions, which are sometimes opposed by eloquent representatives of powerful vested interest groups.
He was Wade Hampton Frost lecturer, American Public Health Association, 1989; Scholar in Residence, Rockefeller Foundation's Villa Serbelloni Study and Conference Center, Bellagio, 1992.
In 2012 John Last was admitted as an Officer of the Order of Canada in recognition of his service to public health sciences.