John B. Grant International Statesman of Public Health

JOHN B. GRANT WAS BORN to Canadian medical missionaries in Ningbo, China, in 1890. He graduated from Acadia College in Nova Scotia in 1912 and received his medical education at University of Michigan and his public health degree from the Johns Hopkins University. He would later often refer to Arthur Newsholme and Victor C. Vaughan (his professors in public health), together with George Newman, as the men who had most influenced his thinking about public health.1 Grant joined the International Health Board of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1918 and gained practical experience in a county health program in North Carolina. He went to China to conduct a hookworm survey in 1919. In 1921, Grant was appointed International Health Division representative in China and associate professor of public health of the Peking Union Medical College.

Grant believed that public health was an integral part of socioeconomic progress and that health care could be best achieved by combining preventive and curative medicine through a community “health station.” In 1925, he created a health demonstration station, Beijing First Health Demonstration Station, as a “social laboratory” for training public health professionals and medical students of Peking Union Medical College. The station, a project of collaboration with Beijing Municipal Police in a ward of 95 956 people half a mile from Peking Union Medical College, had three divisions of activities: general sanitation, vital statistics and communicable diseases, and medical services. Besides regular teaching and investigative research, the station maintained a school health service for 1800 students and an industrial medical service for 1200 workers. It also served as a health center for a population of 45 000. The health station offered short training courses for traditional midwives and municipal sanitary police.2 The courses for the midwives developed into the First National Midwifery School in 1928, which represented a significant advance toward modern maternity and child health work in China. The health station experiment was extended into rural China in 1929 when Grant and his colleagues established a health station in Ding Xian, a county of 400 000 people west of Beijing. The Ding Xian experiment integrated health work into a comprehensive rural education and reform movement. It provided affordable health care to the peasants and short training courses for village health workers. These efforts provided the models for the training of barefoot doctors and rural health reforms in the 1950s to 1970s.3

Grant’s ideas of health work on a community basis constituted an innovative experiment in the 1920s, but they matured in the following decades as Grant applied the lessons learned in China to many other countries. In 1939, after 18 years of health work in China, Grant was appointed director of the All-India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health in Calcutta and served in this position until 1945. He was instrumental in shaping the recommendations of the Bhore Committee in 1944, which provided a blueprint for the organization of medical education and health care in India. After World War II, Grant worked with international and US governmental organizations including the Economic Cooperation Administration, President Truman’s Commission on the Health Needs of the Nation, and the World Health Organization. He conducted surveys of medical care plans in the United States, Canada, Asia, and Europe. From 1954 until his death in October 1962, Grant advised the Puerto Rican government on a plan for regionalization of their health services, showing how the hospitals and medical services belonging to different agencies could be coordinated into a smoothly working system to provide even the most isolated villages with access to excellent medical care. Grant also taught as professor of public health at the University of Puerto Rico.4

Many countries awarded Grant with high honors for his contributions to public health. China presented him with the Jade Order in 1940; Britain honored him with Commander of the Most Excellent Order in 1945, France with Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1952, and Denmark with Commander of the Order of the Elephant in 1952. The United States awarded him the Lasker Award in 1960 “in recognition of more than forty years of inspired leadership in promoting the health and well-being of mankind throughout the world.”5