He vigorously promoted the cause of education nationwide, without distinction of sex, race, or creed. He championed the cause of public sanitation, creating schools of public health at Johns Hopkins and Harvard, and helped lead major international public-health efforts against hookworm, malaria, yellow fever, and other maladies. He revolutionized medical training in the United States, and built China’s first proper medical school.
Within his lifetime, Rockefeller helped launch the field of biomedical research, funding scientific investigations that resulted in vaccines for things like meningitis and yellow fever. A natural businessman with a strong moral sense and intense religious convictions, he dedicated unprecedented resources to charity. He was equally distinguished as a philanthropist. He became the richest man of his time, and indeed has a good claim to perhaps being the richest self-made man who ever lived. At its peak, Rockefeller’s net worth was around 1.5 percent of the country’s total annual economic output-the equivalent of about $280 billion today, or about three times the wealth controlled by Bill Gates. After starting life in humble circumstances, John Rockefeller came to dominate the burgeoning petroleum industry by the time he was 40 years old.
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