This article investigates how World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Halfdan Mahler’s views on health care were formed by his experience in India between 1951 and 1961. Mahler spent a large part of the 1950s in India assigned as WHO medical officer to tuberculosis control projects. It argues that Mahler took inspiration from the official endorsement of the doctrine of social medicine that prevailed in India; even if it was challenged by an increasing preference for vertical, techno-centric campaigns. It shows how, from the outset, Mahler was remarkably hostile towards the highly skilled, clinically oriented doctors, but embraced prevalent ideas of community participation. It suggests that Mahler – although he remained silent on the issue – was impressed by the importance and resilience of indigenous traditions of medicine, despite hostility from leading political figures. In this way, the article attempts to establish links to Mahler’s advocacy of primary health care in the 1970s. A broad approach to health, scepticism toward clinically oriented doctors, preference for simple technologies and community participation, as well as an accommodating attitude towards indigenous practitioners, were all features of primary health care, which correlate well with views developed by Mahler as he negotiated social medicine in India between 1951 and 1961.

Our contributions examine the Norwegian Karl Evang's (1901-1981) and the Dane Halfdan Mahler's (1923-2016) participation in international health co-operation facilitated by the World Health Organization (WHO) in India in the 1950s. While Evang’s was a hectic, but relatively short visit as part of a WHO visiting team of medical scientists in 1953, Mahler’s spanned the entire decade on assignments as WHO medical officer to tuberculosis control projects. Mahler’s name should be familiar to researchers of international health as the Director-General of the WHO 1973-88, and for his promotion of primary health care through the 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration. Evang, Norway’s Director of Health 1938-72, was also a key figure in international health in the mid-twentieth century as one of the original instigators of the WHO, and a participant in much of its early work.

A core theme is the place of social medicine, both in Evang’s and Mahler’s work, and within the WHO and its navigation of complex postcolonial settings in the 1950s. Investigating cross-regional encounters and circulations of social medicine ideas between Evang and Mahler and their Indian interlocutors as well as international WHO staff members, we ask what the role of social medicine was in international health in the early post-war period. Researchers have found that social medicine had its heyday during the 1930s and 1940s, and that a technology-focused, vertical approach became dominant soon after the war. In contrast, we suggest that continued circulation of social medical ideas points towards a more complicated picture.

The campaigns to prevent smallpox in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are commonly understood as the first attempts of large-scale state-sponsored medical intervention in society as such. Before the discovery of the cowpox vaccine inoculation with variolous matter—known as variolation—was the most widespread preventive against the disease. This practice was well established in parts of Asia and introduced to Europe by Mary Wortley Montagu from Constantinople in 1721. While variolation achieved some popularity—particularly in Britain—Edward Jenner's discovery of the cowpox vaccine in 1796 intensified the efforts to combat smallpox, and vaccination was introduced to large parts of the world within a few years. Although the spread of immunization against smallpox is commonly described as highly successful, the campaigns also represented an early encounter between an elitist state-sponsored medicine and various forms of popular resistance.

In the fifteen years following World War II more was done to combat tuberculosis than at any other time in world history. On every continent, hundreds of millions received the BCG (Bacillus Calmette Guérin) vaccine and millions more benefited from newly discovered antibiotics. TB research and attempts to control the disease knit together disparate populations and places as a network of experts and a matrix of ideas spread out across the globe linking the world through a common vaccine, a battery of antibiotics, and a knowledge network. Medicine became internationalized as organizations like the WHO and UNICEF began to see diseases as global problems and not solely the concern of individual countries.

An important branch in recent debates on the nature of the judiciary in colonial south India has focused on the extent to which the judicial institutions—and the social transformations mediated through them—were controlled by the colonial state. This debate is of interest not only from the point of legal history. From the broader perspective of social and cultural history the debate is important because it draws attention to issues such as indigenous agency, conceptual negotiation and the hybrid nature of institutions under colonial rule. It is these issues I intend to address through an analysis of indigenous litigation in the Mayor's Court in late eighteenth-century Madras. The analysis falls in two parts. First, I analyse how indigenous agents availed themselves of the court, despite an official colonial policy of excluding disputes between Indians from its jurisdiction. In the second part, I focus on the ways in which the nature of property was contested and negotiated in complex dialogues between indigenous litigants and representatives of the colonial judiciary. Both parts of the analysis indicate that important aspects of the litigation in the Mayor's Court were largely beyond the control of the colonial authorities.