Richard Morrow

Marrow was born in Arlington Heights, Illinois. His father, Richard Morrow, was an inventor who sold vacuum cleaners of his own design, and a commercial paper bag opener for fast food restaurants. His mother, Mary Blyth Morrow, was a homemaker and had attended Sorbonne University in Paris.[2]

He graduated from Swarthmore College in economics, and from Washington University Medical School with his M.D. He also earned a master of public health from Harvard University. After earning his medical degree, he did his residency at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, N.Y. He also spent a year working in Many Farms, Arizona, treating members of the Navajo tribe, while he and his wife lived in a converted railroad car.[2]

In 1962, he and his wife moved to Accra, Ghana to help establish a National Institute of Health. The Morrows then moved to Uganda, where his wife was a peace corps nurse, and he studied infectious diseases such as buruli ulcers.[2]

From 1970 to 1976,[2] Morrow was a professor of international health at the Harvard School of Public Health, before returning to Ghana for three years,[2] and then to work for the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. From 1979 to 1991,[3] he was the director of epidemiology and field research for the WHO's Tropical Disease Research and Training.[1] In 1991, he joined the faculty of the Department of International Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.[1]

Morrow was responsible for the development of a system for measuring the burden of disease, which he published in a report in 1991. This was adopted by the World Health Organization, and the calculation of Disability-adjusted life years is derived from this.[3]

In 2006, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Public Health Association.[2]

Marrow met his wife, Helga Magnus, while he was in medical school and she was in nursing school. They had four children.[2][4] He died of pancreatic cancer on August 17, 2013 at his home in Baltimore.[2]