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Reviewed by:
  • Brock Chisholm, the World Health Organization, and the Cold War
  • David Murray
Brock Chisholm, the World Health Organization, and the Cold War. John Farley. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008. Pp. 272, $85.00 cloth

John Farley tells his readers in his preface that few Canadians today can identify Brock Chisholm. Those who know his name probably recall him as the man who tried to convince parents and children not to believe in Santa Claus. In 1945, when he was serving as Canada’s deputy minister of health and welfare as well as a psychiatrist, he told a horrified audience in Ottawa’s wealthy Rockcliffe Park that ‘any child who believes in Santa Claus has had his ability to think permanently destroyed’ (43). Chisholm’s controversial public speeches, which he was fond of making, annoyed his boss, Brooke Claxton, the minister of health and welfare, who was only too happy to see him resign the next year and take up a position with the interim commission that preceded the World Health Organization (who).

Farley’s book focuses on Chisholm’s role as the first director general of who, one of the specialized international agencies of the United Nations established after the Second World War. Farley claims that ‘building the who was to be [Chisholm’s] life work’ (75). In fact, Chisholm was directly involved with who from 1946 when he became the executive secretary of the preliminary organization to 1953 when he retired after one term as director general of who. It certainly was an important period of Chisholm’s life, but a relatively brief one, leaving plenty of room for a biographer who wanted to explore Chisholm’s earlier career more fully. Farley does outline Chisholm’s military career in a helpful chapter, but perhaps more could have been said about the development of his beliefs, his work as director general of medical services for the Canadian army in the Second World War, and then his two-year stint as deputy minister in the newly created Department of Health and Welfare.

who’s mandate was disease prevention and control across the globe. Chisholm not only supplied the name World for the new organization, he articulated a vision of world citizenship that had its [End Page 578] origins, according to Farley, in his extensive military service in the First World War. Chisholm twice won the Military Cross for bravery. He told the Third World Health Assembly in 1951 that ‘world health, world security and world peace are indivisible’ (68). Chisholm’s vision went beyond this to a hope that the United Nations and its agencies would become a supranational organization, leading to a new form of world government. For him this was the only alternative to nuclear annihilation. Even if his larger vision was unrealized, it shaped what he wanted who to become.

Much of the book deals with the tangled political relationships within who, a web of international rivalry and Cold War politics that Chisholm, as the director general, constantly had to navigate. Interspersed are thematic chapters on various diseases from tuberculosis to malaria that provide useful summaries of how who tried to fight them. Farley describes the internal debates in detail and thus emphasizes the inner bureaucracy of the organization. His balanced account of the attempts to battle these diseases leads to his conclusion that ‘there are no simple answers when it comes to public health’ (156). At times in these chapters, however, we lose sight of Chisholm, leaving the reader to wonder whether this is a biography of the man or a monograph on the early years of who.

Chisholm was not the only Canadian to play an important role in the formative years of who. Lyle Creelman, a Vancouver nurse, moved to who in 1950 and later became its chief nursing officer after she had served as chief nurse in the British zone of occupied Germany for unrra. She is not mentioned in this account, reflecting the author’s focus on the policy debates and national rivalries rather than on the people who served the organization and their interaction with the director general.

Chisholm’s ability to get under people’s skins because of his controversial...

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