page_title: Dean Conant Worcester
section_title: Public service in the Insular Government of the Philippine Islands
hierarchical_section_title: Dean Conant Worcester / Public service in the Insular Government of the Philippine Islands
caption_attribution_description: English: Dean Conant Worcester (1866–1924)
context_page_description: Dean Conant Worcester, D.Sc., FRGS was an American zoologist, public official, and authority on the Philippines, born at Thetford, Vermont, and educated at the University of Michigan. He first went to the Philippines in 1887 as a junior member of a scientific expedition, and built a controversial career in the early American colonial government beginning in 1899 based upon his experience in the country. He was fiercely opposed to Philippine independence and a firm believer in the colonial mission. He served as the influential Secretary of the Interior of the Philippine Islands until 1913 when he began focusing on his business interests. He died in the Philippines having organized and managed businesses that included coconut farming and processing, cattle raising and a maritime shipping line.
context_section_description: When the Spanish–American War broke out in 1898, Worcester was very quick to capitalize on his first-hand knowledge of the Philippines by engaging in public lectures and establishing himself as a leading authority on the country with the October 1898 publication of his Philippine Islands and their People. Worcester was an avid photographer during his time in the Philippines and his published photographs had a profound influence in shaping public opinion in the United States about the "exotic" Filipinos.
  On 20 January 1899, Worcester was appointed by President McKinley as a member of the Shurman Commission (First Philippine Commission) to make recommendations on how the U.S should proceed after the sovereignty of the Philippines was ceded to the United States by Spain by the Treaty of Paris (1898). He was again appointed on 16 March 1900 by McKinley as the only member from the Schurman Commission to serve on the successor Taft Commission (Second Philippine Commission) where he served until 1913. As a member of the Philippine Commission, he simultaneously served in the highly influential role of Secretary of the Interior for the Insular Government. In this capacity he oversaw the founding of a number of agencies, including the Bureau of Agriculture, Bureau of Science, Bureau of Government Laboratories and the Bureau of Health. In 1907, he founded the Philippine Medical School and in 1908 laid the cornerstone of the Philippine General Hospital, which opened in 1910 and has become the primary teaching hospital for the University of the Philippines College of Medicine and a hospital for the poor.
  Worcester had a keen interest in public health, but his response to a major 1902–04 outbreak of cholera in Manila and other Philippine cities was highly criticized. The epidemic was particularly severe in the district of Farola in Manila (near present-day San Nicolas) that was home to many of the city's poorest. Worcester ordered the burning of hundreds of houses and forced quarantine of many frightened and homeless Filipinos. Despite these draconian measures taken by Worcester and public health officials, 109,461 people died in Manila and elsewhere in the Philippines. Failure to effectively control this major outbreak and subsequent cholera outbreaks in 1905 and 1908 were major embarrassments for Worcester and drew the ire of the Philippine press often claiming that the public health measures were primarily aimed at clearing slums for the redevelopment of the valuable Manila seaport area. In response, the Insular Department of Interior, primarily under the authorship of Worcester, published a history of these cholera outbreaks with an account of the agency's attempts to control them. In the monograph, he said that he went too far by ordering the burning of the houses in the Farola district.
  Worcester was alleged to have used his anthropological research to seek out gold in Benguet and exploit untapped natural resources in Mindoro and Mindanao. He was also alleged to have profited from the illegal sale of diseased cattle meat and from the sale of overpriced land concessions on government property.
caption: Dean Worcester
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