XUNICEF News and Views

  In April 2021 I wrote a mini-series of four articles on UNICEF's early days in China. Rereading them recently, it seemed to me that I was missing a piece on Leo Eloesser who played such an important role in China but in UNICEF's thinking on community medicine and primary health care. He only worked with UNICEF for a very short time—5 years—but they were momentous years for UNICEF and for him. In this article I write only about his history before and after UNICEF. The story of his brief period with UNICEF will come in the next article, The Shijiazhuang Strategy . One of the most interesting, colorful, and important characters in UNICEF's early history was Dr. Leo Eloesser. In what remains the best and most comprehensive book on UNICEF's history, The Children and the Nations , Maggie Black describes how the newly arrived first representative of UNICEF in China, Dr. Marcel Junod, recruited Eloesser from UNRRA to serve as his emissary to parts of China under Comm...

This article tells the story of the Shijiazhuang Agreement of August 1948 and UNICEF's first attempt to switch from distribution of relief supplies to capacity building through training of community health workers and village midwives. The Idea Had History The idea was certainly not new. For more than twenty years, Chinese and foreign public-health pioneers had been experimenting with ways of bringing basic health services to China's enormous rural population. Eloesser had also learned from war. Like Marcel Junod, he had witnessed the carnage of the Spanish Civil War; unlike Junod, Eloesser and Norman Bethune had worked as surgeons on the Republican side. Both had learned the value of simple techniques and the rapid training of nurses, orderlies and others when doctors and conventional medical facilities were scarce. Early in his China assignment, Eloesser went north on a WHO teaching assignment and spent five months at a small village hospital named for Bethune. With virtua...