Statistics and Public Health at the League of Nations

The League of Nations Health Organization was created as policymakers grappled with the cataclysmic consequences of two pandemics: global influenza and typhus in Eastern Europe. Contemporaries drew one understudied lesson from those pandemics: the value of information, particularly statistics, to prevent the spread of infectious disease. The Polish head of the League of Nations Health Organization from 1921 to 1939, Ludwik Rajchman, believed fervently that statistics would “demonstrate the practicability and the indispensability of international health work,” perhaps by eliminating epidemics altogether. This paper traces how the Health Organization standardized the content and forms of epidemiological intelligence during the interwar period, how this solidified particular European understandings of disease, and why the Health Organization became the indispensable intermediary between territories whose notation systems had not been mutually comprehensible. Just as patient histories were standardized over the late nineteenth century, League officials sought to mold the numbers that they received. The boxes of submissions from 74 countries, colonies, or territories around the world show myriad methods to represent disease: narrative, drawings, maps, graphs, or tables with signs like circles or pluses that bear little resemblance to statistics today. League officials both solicited more statistics and pushed government officials to generate statistics that fit the League’s vision of how disease should be represented. I show how these initiatives fit into the League’s broader push to standardize financial and economic data. Finally, the paper explores how the League’s system directly laid the groundwork for the international health statistics of the United Nations.