In February and March 1953, a WHO Visiting Team of Medical Scientists worked in India, collaborating with local medical students and professionals. This article studies the complexities of early postcolonial international health work and the relations between the young WHO and the newly independent countries, from the position of the team’s vice chairman, Norwegian doctor Karl Evang. While the WHO aimed to create dialogue and interaction, also learning from the host country, the article finds that an equal exchange of views between visitors and hosts was not achieved. The topic pertains to discussions on power and influence in international organisations and governance, development and health work, within a South Asian setting. Studying intellectual exchanges between Evang and his Indian interlocutors sheds light on India’s role as both receptive and generative site of ideas and political practice, contributing to broader debates on the appropriation, refashioning and application of political ideas in independent India. Also, at a time of new directions in international health, and considering Evang’s social medicine conviction, an additional question concerns the role of social medicine. The article underlines the existence of multiple, parallel tracks in international health work, and argues the need to portray international health as a complex mosaic, rather than a step-by-step development. The case has relevance as historians endeavour to make international and global history more diverse, as through Evang we capture parts of a broader international involvement of people and nation states in the WHO and its work in the early post-war period.

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.