Perspectives in Health Magazine
The Magazine of the Pan American Health Organization
Volume 7, Number 3, 2002

Through Words and Pictures
by Sir George Alleyne

This new world of almost infinite interconnectedness will present problems that one nation cannot deal with alone. There will be a need for joint action, and communication through words and images can help to create a genuine community for health in our Region.

I do not think I have ever really had the last word in my life, and there is indeed never any last word in health matters anyway. However, on this occasion I will use this opportunity to re- flect in this magazine for the last time about its origins, my perception of it and my thoughts about its prospects. I will reflect on how it has fitted into my view of how information should be perceived and used in an organization like ours. I will also mention some of the key actors who are responsible for its success.

It was in April 1995—just three months after I had assumed office—that Roberta Okey and Daniel Epstein of our Office of Public Information came to me to propose that the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) should produce a news magazine. I liked the idea immediately, but because of my cautious nature and with due regard to our financial state, perhaps I did not transmit my enthusiasm to them. Instead I advised that they should survey the potential public to determine the need for such a product. Five months later, when Okey returned with Bryna Brennan, chief of public information, to show me the positive results of the survey, I could be openly enthusiastic about the proposal and agreed to the budget they presented.

Everyone was thrilled with the first issue when it appeared in 1996, and predicted a rosy future. When the magazine was launched officially, I introduced it and waxed warm first about the idea in general and then about the contents, emphasizing particularly the significance of the picture on the cover. It symbolized, perhaps even more than the editors realized, what the magazine would be about. It was a picture of a street vendor pushing his bicycle cart firmly forward. It was a picture of motion and purpose that reflected the reality of life and health in our streets and those who made their living there. This was an affirmation that the information we would present to our public would be in photographs from our archives, many captured through the lens of our master photographer, Armando Waak, as well as pictures painted vividly in words.

I have always been fascinated with the written word and have long had a great respect for the meanings it conveys. While I would not go as far as Chekhov’s dying declaration that "medicine is my legal spouse and literature is my mistress," I do share some of that perspective, and it is a joy to see the faces of health and medicine reflected in literature of various types. Perspectives in Health has indeed allowed many to see through the bald facts that attend many health problems and health triumphs, and frame them in contexts that they understand. It was meant to inform as well as to entertain-a function that it has carried out well.

I saw this news magazine as one of the ways in which we would use information at PAHO. I made it clear from the first day that information would be a key to our work and cited the famous chorus from T. S. Eliot’s The Rock:

"Where is this life we have lost in living?
Where is this wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is this knowledge we have lost in information?"

As the noted author, diplomat and educator Harland Cleveland might have added, Where is the information we have lost in data? I have always believed that information is the key link in that chain, and any good organization has to conceptualize and operationalize its proper use of information.

I have also believed what industrialist Alfred P. Sloan is supposed to have fixed as a major guide for his success: "Know your product and know your public." Our product is very clearly our technical cooperation, but our publics are many and varied, and our success in making our product understandable to our publics rides on our proper use of information. We have as one public the countries of the Americas, which are usually represented by their ministers of health.

But like any organization supported by public funds, we have a responsibility to the various bodies public in the countries that we serve. They wish to relate to what we do. I believe they wish to empathize and sometimes sympathize with us as an organization as we try to help in addressing the great health problems of our time. They also wish to have presented in an attractive way some of the human stories that surround health, and not only relate to the disembodied data that have no faces wreathed in smiles or streaked with tears. They wish to relate to the stories of human triumph and the oft-unspoken reality that death is an inescapable feature of the human condition. They wish to relate to an organization and support it because they see some of its actions in themselves and can be pleased with the goals and achievements that are painted subtly through the words and pictures.

This kind of communication and this kind of information will be increasingly important in the years ahead. There is no doubt that this new world of almost infinite interconnectedness will present problems that one nation cannot deal with alone, and there will be a need for the kind of joint arrangements that facilitate international action. One might say that this was the motive behind the formation of PAHO 100 years ago. That is true, but the difference now is in the intensity and speed of the connections and the nature of the problems. The threat of infectious disease perhaps can be more readily accepted as being of international interest than the many and varied health problems that form the epidemiological mosaic of the Americas.

It is necessary to be able to communicate to the public the essential commonality of many of these health problems and transmit the idea that the heroes of health today are every bit as valiant as those of a century ago and are equally deserving of our recognition. Diseases may change, but the nature of human suffering has not. This kind of communication can serve to create a genuine community for health in our Region, all the while providing the visual entertainment that comes through the effective use of images and words.

There will be some who will predict that modern means of communication will render this type of publication obsolete and that there will be more efficient ways of transmitting information to the public that we wish to reach. I say, perhaps. Touch is also one of the senses that needs to be satisfied, and the portability that is a virtue of this medium contributes to my optimism about its future. The medium is appropriate and attractive, and the message is compelling.

These are reasons enough to feel satisfied with the birth and growth of this magazine and predict for it a bright tomorrow.

Sir George Alleyne concludes his second term as director of the Pan American Health Organization in January 2003.

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