Socrates Litsios: WHO whiz,historian’s apprentice,and camarade

Coming to the practice of history shortly before his retirement from the World Health Organization (WHO) in the late 1990s, Socrates Litsios took on this vocation with an all-consuming and delightful (if at times enervating for others!) devotion.

I first met Socco at a pair of International Network for the History of Malaria meetings in the mid-1990s when I was a newly-minted assistant professor dabbling in the Rockefeller Foundation’s second-order-priority malaria efforts in revolutionary Mexico (Birn, 1998), and he had already produced his engaging volume, which I dub The Yesterday and Tomorrow of Malaria: a historical and insider’s perspective. ¹ I do recall some initial exchanges in those days, but we really bonded in the early 2000s, when I began to work at WHO’s archives in Geneva with some regularity.

As Socco was painstakingly gathering documentation from the WHO library for his two door-stopper volumes – The Third Ten Years of the World Health Organization (WHO, 2008) and then the Fourth (WHO, 2011), crucially reviving the long-abandoned series – I marveled at his diligence and firsthand know-how of the inner workings of WHO and its inter-relations with other UN agencies. This heroic task (in Spanish, trabajo de hormiga, or ‘ant’s work’) of compiling events, resolutions, agenda-setting documents, and themes across the crucial two-decade period (1968–1987) of WHO history benefited immeasurably from his deep institutional knowledge and inside-out familiarity with, among others, the annual World Health Assembly (WHA) and semi-annual Executive Board volumes, mixed with his own historical observations and burgeoning historiographic savvy.

Socco was not much by way of archival research at WHO, instead preferring and referring to the copious Official Records housed in WHO’s library (perhaps thankfully, or these exhaustive (and exhausting) volumes might never have been published).

But he did mine his own collection of papers and eyewitness notes, most famously evidenced in his much-cited personal recollections of the long lead-up to the 1978 International Conference on Primary Health Care (PHC), held in 1978 in Alma-Ata (now Almaty), Kazakhstan (USSR) (Litsios, 2002). Although I told Socco quite frankly that I found his approach (understandably) rather one-sided, if engaging, he did not reject my critique and was instead hungry for more contestation. He even photocopied and mailed to me his entire personal archive relating to Alma-Ata, providing essential materials to my co-authored piece on the Soviet side of the Alma-Ata story (Birn and Krementsov, 2018).

While Socco was himself a historical actor in the Alma-Ata story and numerous other aspects of WHO’s 1960s–1990s history, he was surprised and a tad baffled when I uncovered his indirect role in a WHO critique of Walsh and Warren’s infamous Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored counteroffensive to PHC – so-called Selective PHC (SPHC) – which they named an ‘interim strategy’, not for PHC per se, but for disease control (Walsh and Warren, 1979). Socco, soon to move to WHO’s Malaria Action Programme, was involved in correspondence with that unit’s chief, who argued that the article was simplistic and had misinterpreted WHO malaria data and thus presented a flawed analysis of SPHC’s claimed potential effectiveness.

While Socco had a rich understanding of the historiography of international health, social medicine, and many other topics, by his own admission he was not a historian himself. Instead, I think of him as a self-styled historian’s apprentice (or historians’ apprentice, given how many of us he consulted!). His apprenticeship model was eminently clever – he developed a manuscript just enough to pique the interest of a journal editor, who then sent the piece out to reviewers, who in turn invariably came back with copious comments and suggestions, which Socco then used to rewrite his article in a more scholarly fashion. Socco was the most adept user of the peer review system I have ever come across.

Above all, Socco was keen to learn. He had a knack for finding interconnections between his own varied interests (e.g. the League of Nations Health Organisation, progressive-minded Rockefeller Foundation health officers, rural health, preventive and social medicine, health/development/poverty, atop his main foci on the history of malaria and of WHO) and those of countless historians of international health. At times, it seemed as though he was involved in every crucial conversation of the field.

And converse he did, in person of course and, especially, via email. As was undoubtedly the case for so many others, our email threads could last for weeks or months on end (or even years in the matter of who really wrote the Alma-Ata declaration). Socco was both relentless in his pursuit of clues, answers, archival materials, and research tips and extremely generous in sharing information, contacts with key players, and his own notes and papers on a range of topics. That he tended to overlook that his correspondents were busy with their own research, teaching, jobs, and lives was both maddening and endearing.

A highlight of our friendship was the 6-month sabbatical my family spent in Geneva, when I was based at WHO doing a project on the history of WHO’s post-Alma-Ata social justice efforts. Socco and I shared many a lunch at WHO headquarters, and he introduced me to relevant WHO staff members and retirees involved in intersectoral activities in the 1980s and 1990s, most notably the formidable Aleya Hammad (A tribute, 2014). Thanks to Socco, who tagged along, she welcomed me to her home for a series of remarkable interviews.

Source: Birn, personal archive.

In addition to spending countless hours with Socco tracking down sources and debating the prospects – and missed opportunities – of WHO’s intersectoral approaches, I (with family in tow) was finally able to take him up on his standing invitation to his home in Baulmes. Socco made special arrangements for a few of his gaggle of grandkids to spend the afternoon, so as the young generation ran around the homestead, Socco and I had hours to pore over his files in his cramped, overflowing office cranny; meanwhile, his wife Susan was busy making prints in her amazing (and comparatively expansive) studio. In subsequent years, I often extended my archival visits just so I could make the trek up to Baulmes to see them.

When I was able to return to WHO archives in late 2023, I found Socco’s absence jarring. I sorely miss our conversations and meals and stumbling upon him in the library stacks or assiduously taking notes on a library desk far too small for his huge pile of WHA volumes. And though I never thought I’d say this, my email inbox seems lonely without him.