Hesperian When David Morley died on July 2nd, Hesperian lost a long-standing friend and a loyal but critical supporter. Although he was 86 when he died unexpectedly from a heart attack, David had an unparalleled enthusiasm for his work that belied his age and affected everyone he met.
At the beginning of his medical career, and after working for a short while in general practice, David left England for Imesi-Ile, a village in rural Nigeria and began the pioneering work that would eventually help transform primary health care—especially for children. After arriving in Nigeria he quickly realized that the conventional Western hospital model for delivering health care would neither reduce infant mortality nor cure other serious childhood health problems. Health improvement would only be achieved by providing information and training people locally in health-care skills. By 1965, Imesi-Ile became the first community in the world to record the elimination of measles, achieved by training local women to immunize the children.
After 5 years in Nigeria, David returned to London and founded the Tropical Child Health Unit at the Institute of Child Health in London, but continued to travel internationally working with community-based groups helping them train local health workers. And somewhere along the way, David and Hesperian discovered each other and realized how complementary our people-oriented, low-tech approaches to health care for the world’s poorest people were. Bill Bower, co-author of Hesperian’s Helping Health Workers Learn, remembers David as an “out-of-the-box thinker,” who was consistently supportive of Hesperian’s work and who made the long journey to visit Project Piaxtla—the village-based health project in Ajoya, Mexico where the book Where There Is No Doctor was developed.
David was also a co-founder of Child-to-Child, which teaches children about various health and development issues. Children then pass on what they learn to other children, their families, and their wider communities through participatory activities, such as telling stories and playing games. Hesperian was one of the early “testers” of the Child-to-Child activities at Project Piaxtla, and you will find several of them in Helping Health Workers Learn and Disabled Village Children.
TALC (Teaching-aids At Low Cost), also founded by David, develops and distributes low-cost health education materials (including Hesperian’s books) to community health workers all over the global south.. TALC has been especially instrumental for getting wider distribution of Where There Is No Doctor, particularly in Africa. And unlike most octogenarians, David jumped whole hog into modern technology by pioneering the use of CD-ROMs as a way to provide access to health and medical education information in areas beyond the reach of the internet.
Over the 30-plus years we have been colleagues, we have been champions of each other’s work. It will be difficult to continue extending the reach of primary health care without David, and certainly we will not do it as creatively, as sensitively, or as successfully in his absence. David Morley will remain an inspiration to all of us involved in making health a reality for all people.
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