Herbert Ratner Biography

Herbert Spencer Ratner (also Herbert Albert Ratner) (May 23, 1907 – December 6, 1997), an American physician, taught and wrote on the philosophy and history of medicine and was a popular lecturer on marriage and the family. Ratner was the director of public health for the community of Oak Park, Illinois, for twenty-five years. 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. For more than twenty-nine years Ratner was editor of Child and Family Quarterly, a paramedical journal which ran articles on the Hippocratic Oath, infant development, women’s health, and other topics related to family health.