International Epidemiological Association - How IT Started

How It Started

The International Corresponding Club, as the IEA was first called, was started in 1954 by John Pemberton of Great Britain and Harold N Willard of the United States with the advice and help of the late Robert Cruickshank. They had found, as traveling Research Fellows each in the other’s country, that they were handicapped by not being sufficiently well informed about the research and teaching in the field of social and preventive medicine in the various medical schools and research institutes. Initially it was to try and remedy this defect, that the Club was established on a small and informal basis. At first it was just a corresponding club whose object was ‘to facilitate the communication between physicians working for the most part in university departments of preventive and social medicine, or in research institutes devoted to these aspects of medicine, throughout the world’. This was to be achieved by the publication of a Bulletin twice a year and by members endeavouring to ‘ensure a friendly and hospitable welcome for visitors’ from other countries. The first issue of the Bulletin appeared in January 1955 and contained contributions from 26 correspondents from nine countries.

Correspondents soon felt the need to meet to discuss research and teaching and the first formal meeting took place at the Ciba Foundation in London at the end of June 1956. By this time there were 49 correspondents from 18 countries, and one of them, A. Querido of Amsterdam invited the Club to hold its First International Scientific Meeting in the Netherlands. As a consequence a ‘Study Group on Current Epidemiological Research’, supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, took place at Noordwijk in September 1957. There were 58 participants representing 44 university departments from 20 countries at this meeting. A constitution was formulated and the first executive committee was elected. The Noordwijk meeting was the first of the nineteenth international scientific meetings which have been held to date. The second was held in the Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia in 1959 when the present title of the Association was adopted.