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Perspectives in Health Magazine
The Magazine of the Pan American Health Organization
Volume 7, Number 1, 2002
Pages: Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8   Print Version: Text Version Index Article Index  

A Century of Public Health
in the Americas


PAHO Family Album
 
Dr. Rupert Blue
Photo ©U.S. Public Health ServiceNo descriptionPhoto ©American Red Cross

up arrow U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Rupert Blue (1868-1948) was the International Sanitary Bureau's second chairman, serving from 1911 to 1920. He had carried out crucial campaigns against bubonic plague in San Francisco (right) in 1902-04 and after the earthquake and fire of 1906. Yet his years at the Bureau were marked by a decline in inter-American health cooperation, an indirect result of the outbreak of World War I.

Dr. Cumming
©U.S. Public Health Service
Pan American Union headquarters
Photo ©OAS

up arrow Dr. Hugh S. Cumming (1869-1948), the third U.S. surgeon general to serve simultaneously as director of PAHO, was a prominent U.S. expert on immigration and quarantinable diseases. Under his leadership, the Bureau's budget more than quintupled, and its activities expanded to cover a wide range of public health issues. He was the longest-serving PAHO director, from 1920 to 1947.

up arrow PAHO started life in December 1902 as the International Sanitary Bureau, a paper organization with no permanent staff or office space. By 1921, the Bureau had found a home in the Ibero-Renaissance-style headquarters of the Pan American Union (forerunner of the Organization of American States). Renamed the Pan American Sanitary Bureau in 1923, the health agency finally became known as PAHO in 1958.

Signatories of the Pan American Sanitary Code
up arrow A portrait of the signatories of the 1924 Pan American Sanitary Code, the first treaty to be signed by all the republics of the Americas. Dr. Carlos Graf, delegate of Chile (seated far left), wrote of the occasion:
"We delegates gather once again, yearning for progress and the possible perfection of our health institutions, taking new steps that will be firm and sure in the spirit that guides us, to maintain the health, well-being, and correct development of our peoples, to liberate them from the snares of the 100-headed hydra of vice and pain, and when possible, to extend those benefits to the rest of the world's peoples, for by natural law, the younger, with their strength, should help the eldest."

Dr. Chagas
©PAHO/WHONo description©Oswaldo Cruz Foundation
Dr. John Long
©OASNo description©PAHO/WHO

up arrow Dr. Carlos Chagas (1878-1934), delegate of Brazil to the Sixth Pan American Sanitary Conference, discovered American Trypanosomiasis, known as Chagas' disease, in 1909. An early antimalaria campaigner and onetime director of Brazil's Department of Public Health, he was nominated twice for a Nobel Prize, though he never won the award.

up arrow Dr. John D. Long, PAHO's first "traveling representative," worked for the Organization for 25 years, promoting sanitation campaigns against epidemic diseases including bubonic plague. A coauthor of the Pan American Sanitary Code and the health codes of Chile, Ecuador, and Panama, Long received numerous honors from the countries of the Region.

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