A Little History #1 : A Young Man - One Hundred Years Ago : Tom McDermott

 

The young man had grown up as a social- activist, revolutionary, and perhaps predictably - soon became a prison inmate. Once freed from prison he told his family that he wanted to study law.  Instead, his family insisted that he take up medicine. At university he studied under a professor of bacteriology who had worked with Louis Pasteur.  This connection led the young man to post-graduate studies at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and later to London's Kings College prestigious laboratory of bacteriology.  When his country gained its independence at the end of World War I, the young physician returned home to establish its national institute of epidemiology and school of hygiene.  

One hundred years ago - in June 1921 the Secretary-General of the League of Nations appointed the still young (age 33) physician to be the first director of the League's Health Organization - the organization that would later become the World Health Organization. 

In setting up its health organization the League was driven first by concerns over the post-war health situation in Europe and Russia in the aftermath of the war and the global influenza pandemic.  The Rockefeller Foundation had already been active in establishing national public health structures in several countries.  The Foundation welcomed a new international organization for health and provided much of its initial funding.  The task of the League's organization quickly became one of tying together the nascent national public health structures in Europe and eventually forming a global network.   

The attention of the organization's young director soon turned to Asia.  While visiting Japan in 1925 he received an invitation to tour China.  That invitation was engineered by the Rockefeller Foundation representative in Beijing, who himself had been directly responsible for establishing China's early public health structure and later its school of public health.  The visit of the League's health director became the first of many visits and led to China becoming a focus of much of the League's public health work until 1935 when war made this impossible. 

By then the advent of war in Europe was also impacting the League itself. The director's strong anti-fascist views brought him under intense political pressure and he was forced to resign from the League at the beginning of 1939.  When Paris fell to German forces in 1940 he escaped to the US.  There he worked with groups organizing food aid for Poland and other parts of occupied eastern Europe.  

In 1943 he was among those looking towards the postwar future in Europe and Asia.  He published that year an article titled 'A United Nations Health Service - Why Not?'  In 1944 he joined the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA - note that this organization was of the United Nations before the United Nations itself was established).  His task was to develop programmes for epidemiology and health for the flood of refugees which would follow the end of the war.  

When east / west politics led to the collapse of UNRRA in 1946, he proposed that all residual funds should be directed to help the primary victims of the war - the children.  At UNRRA's final Council in June 1946 he drew up a resolution to establish a UN International Children's Emergency Fund.  This resolution was unanimously approved by the Council, and then by the UN Economic and Social Council in September 1946, and by the General Assembly in December 1946.  

UNICEF was born.

Now let's add a few names:  

The young Polish physician appointed 100 years ago as the Director of the League's Health Organization was Dr. Ludwik Rajchman - often called the founder of UNICEF.  He served as the first Chairman of UNICEF's Executive Board until 1950.

The representative of the Rockefeller Foundation who invited Rajchman to China - Dr. John Grant, father of our late Executive Director, Jim Grant.  At the time Rajchman visited Beijing, little Jim Grant was three years old.  

The director of the US Commission for Polish Relief with whom Rajchman organized aid for eastern Europe was Maurice Pate who became UNICEF's first Executive Director and served in that position until 1965.