«Back to other tributes I knew Carl Taylor for 40 years. I met Carl in 1969 when I was a lowly medical student who aspired to be a medical missionary. I was applying for the Master of Public Health Program at Johns Hopkins. Carl took me to lunch that day. He became my teacher and mentor during my MPH year, and over the years that followed I had the privilege of keeping in touch with him on a personal basis, occasionally lecturing in one of his classes, and stopping by from time to time to say hello when I was visiting in Baltimore. In spite of his enormous workload and responsibilities, he always had a deep interest in me, my career, and my own meager efforts to promote the health of communities. Between 2004 and 2009, I had the unique privilege of working with him as the Carl Taylor Professor for Equity and Empowerment at Future Generations, an NGO and graduate school without walls that is plowing exciting ground in educational innovation for practitioners who work with communities around the world. The field programs of Future Generations are built on SEED-SCALE principles outlined in the book Just and Lasting Change: When Communities Own Their Future, which Carl and his son Daniel co-authored. The Master of Arts Program in Applied Community Change and Conservation that Future Generations has been operating since 2004 is one of the most exciting new initiatives in graduate education to come along in many years, according to those who have served as members of accreditation teams. They have examined every nook and cranny of the program, leading to its full accreditation as a graduate school last month. These educational concepts were developed by Carl and Daniel together, reflecting their long experience in introducing students to communities and their joint commitment to and love for communities. Students are drawn from those who are working with or for communities anywhere in the world. While they continue their local work, they enroll for distance learning in the master's program but gather in one place for a month twice a year over a two-year period—first in India, then in the US, then in Peru, then in Nepal. This period together provides opportunities for field visits, classroom sessions from the faculty, and learning from each other. During the past 6 years, as I had the privilege to work side-by-side with Carl as the first Carl Taylor Professor for Equity and Empowerment at Future Generations, I came to admire him more and more because: - I saw firsthand how deeply he cared about people and their well-being, particularly the poorest of the poor, women, students, colleagues, and, not least, his family.
- I saw firsthand that he was tireless. Almost 14 years ago, I stopped by Carl's office when I was visiting from Bangladesh. It happened to be his 80th birthday. I asked him when he was going to start to slow down and he said immediately, "But there’s so much to do!" Then, a few years ago, I asked him when the last time he took a vacation was, and he said: "Vacation? What’s that?" More than once he told me when we were in the field together that he had gotten up in the middle of the night to think about an issue that had come up during the previous day.
- I saw firsthand that he always managed to look at the positive side of an issue. He didn’t dwell on disappointments and frustrations. "Accentuate the positive!" was his motto.
Carl was a practitioner of medicine, surgery, and public health. He was a teacher, researcher, and scholar. He was a mentor to thousands, and he was a global leader in the field he did so much to create – international health – and a passionate advocate for community health, women’s empowerment, community empowerment, and primary health care as defined in the Declaration of Alma Ata (which he helped write).  Our troubled and hurting world needs more people like Carl Taylor who—to paraphrase the words of an anonymous writer—do not have a price at which they can be bought; who do not borrow from integrity to pay for expediency; whose handshake is an ironclad contract; who are not afraid of risk; who are as honest in small matters as they are in large ones; whose ambitions are big enough to include others; who know how to win with grace and lose with dignity; who do not believe that shrewdness and cunning and ruthlessness are the three keys to success; who still have friends they made twenty years ago; who are not afraid to go against the grain of popular opinion; who are occasionally wrong and always willing to admit it. In short, the world needs leaders.
We remember Carl as a leader, a servant to the forgotten and neglected bottom billion of our deeply divided world, a dedicated teacher, and a pioneer in global health. His remarkable gifts were all freely and lovingly given with unwavering dedication to the spirit of Alma Ata and Health for All. The photo to the right shows Carl dancing with a Peruvian woman following the dedication of a Future Generations community health program several years ago. I share all this as only one of thousands of students, colleagues, and ordinary people in communities around the world who have been inspired and encouraged because of the personal interest and encouragement Carl showed all of us. His last professional activity came only a week before he died. What a privilege I had in witnessing it. He mustered all the energy he could and walked slowly into the first session of the course he taught for several decades at Johns Hopkins—Case Studies in Primary Health Care. He sat with us for more than 40 minutes reflecting on the origins of primary health care, the pioneers of primary health care, and his many contributions to it—with that characteristic twinkle in his eye and that gentle touch of humor that continued until the very end of his earthly journey. Once again, he captured the hearts and minds of those aspiring to follow in his footsteps.
Henry B. Perry, MD, PhD, MPH
Senior Associate, Health Systems Program, Department of International Health
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Baltimore, Maryland
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