Socrates Litsios,between internal and external history of the World Health Organization

I first met Socrates through his writing during the initial months of my PhD journey. I was reading his chronicles on World Health Organization (WHO) history, decade by decade (Litsios and World Health Organization, 2008, 2011). Although not an easy read, the volume provided a comprehensive overview of the impressive breadth of programs undertaken by WHO. This was in 2012, when historiography on WHO was still in its early stages, with notable publications primarily focusing on malaria and other transmissible disease control. As one of its kind, the volume symbolizes Socrates’ significant contribution to the history of global health. He navigated both the internal and external history of WHO and its predecessors.

Later that year, I met Socrates in person at a coffee shop in Lausanne, not far from Baulmes, where he lived. When he learned about my project on WHO’s statistical work, he shared that he was initially hired by WHO as a statistician to be the Chief of Operational Research. Later, with some organizational shifts, he began writing the volumes on WHO’s history. That conversation, casually mentioned, has stayed with me ever since, vividly illustrating how statisticians throughout history have navigated such a vast organization. That story was one of the sparks that motivated me to write the history of global health statistics through statisticians’ trajectories and viewpoints (Lin, 2022). He gave me a print of his article ‘John B. Grant: A 20th-century Public Health Giant’ (Litsios, 2011), which detailed the Peking Union Medical College Public Health Professor’s contributions to public health. Along with his earlier article on Selskar Gunn, the author of the Rockefeller China Program in the 1930s, Socrates chronicled two of the most important figures in Rockefeller’s endeavors in China (Litsios, 2005).

Living in Baulmes, near Lausanne, Socrates was a local sage to me, always generous in sharing his wisdom with later generations. The diversity in his career made him an ideal candidate to share his experiences with the engineering students in my class on the history of globalization. In his talk, he skillfully connected the genealogy of social medicine in international organizations from the interwar to postwar years, drawing from his extensive experience within WHO. Several years ago, I discovered his donation of several shelves of books to the University of Lausanne’s Bibliothèque l’Institut des Humanités en Médecine. Generous yet low-profile, he contributed immensely to our knowledge of the history of global health.