Allan Goldman served in Korea
ALLAN GOLDMAN '76PH
Turning on to health care
As a Peace Corps volunteer from 1971 to 1973, Allan Goldman '76PH was a health-care worker in the poorest province of South Korea. When he thinks back about his time there, what he recalls most are the people.
"I remember some of these country folks coming into the health center and their kindness, their honesty, their acceptance of life and of me," recalls Goldman, who was a member of the first class at Emory to receive a master's degree in public health. "They just were good people. Some of them did not have a lot of money, and they would come in for these market days and I remember on several occasions that folks gave me a present because they knew I wasn't with my family and I was all alone in their country and that it was a poor country. They felt so bad, and I was doing something nice for them."
In Korea, Goldman was in charge of a tuberculosis control program. When public health emergencies arose, however, his job description expanded to meet the crisis.
"It was sort of like the cowboy frontier," he recalls. "There would be a typhoid epidemic, and we'd go out to the bus stations and vaccinate people. Whenever there was a problem, we'd go out [and work on it]."
An Atlanta resident, Goldman has worked for Georgia's Department of Human Resources for more than a decade. As an assistant to the director of that agency, he is responsible for developing programs and for the financing and delivery of services to older adults. In 1985, he performed the first state study of Alzheimer's disease in Georgia, the results of which were used to develop services for Alzheimer's patients.
Goldman says his time in the Peace Corps inspired him to pursue a career in public health.
"The experience was really old-timey public health, and it was a turn-on. It was exciting, and you could see how you could make a contribution by preventing some of these diseases. It was really very meaningful."--J.D.T.
