W.H.O Is Brock Chisholm?

"That Canada, a country which prides itself on its support for the United Nations … no longer remembers that one of its own became the first director general of one of the UN’s most important agencies is a national disgrace.”

Thus John Farley, a veteran historian of science and medicine at Dalhousie University, justifies his book-length account of Dr. Brock Chisholm’s service in the early years of the World Health Organization. Fair enough in the sense that Chisholm has certainly been forgotten, both in Canada and everywhere else. The problem is that Farley, being an honest scholar, works against himself in showing that Chisholm has been deservedly forgotten. Both at the time and since, most people who paid attention to his career, including Canadians, thought that Chisholm himself was a bit of a second-rater. The role he played in the formative years of the WHO had nothing to do with Canada or Canadian health care, and does not seem to have been distinguished or...