4 Public health, hygiene and social activism Thomas D’haeninck, Jan Vandersmissen, Gita Deneckere and Christophe Verbruggen In 1910, the Dutch physician Pieter Eijkman published L’inter- nationalisme médical. 1 In his introduction he referred to the German- born British physician August Schuster, who one year earlier, at the XVIe Congrès international de Médecine in Budapest (1909), strongly expressed the need for a coordination of the almost countless and often competing international eforts in the feld of medical science and healthcare. 2 Based on a typology of 30 cat- egories, Eijkman listed 199 medical organisations and saw his extensive overview as a frst step towards the establishment of an organisation of international organisations. In his overview, Eijkman praised three initiatives taken or supported by Belgians. The frst was the Union internationale des Patronages, founded in Belgium by Henri Jaspar, secretary of the Commission royale des Patronages de Belgique. The union stressed the importance of health and hygiene, but went beyond purely medico-scientifc practices by widening its scope to child protection, patronage of detained prisoners and ways of helping beggars and vagabonds. The second was the Concours pour un Remède contre la Maladie du Sommeil, an international prize installed in 1906 by King Leopold II, until 1908 sovereign of the Congo Free State (CFS). Sleeping sickness (human trypanosomiasis) was a devastating epidemic that in the frst decade of the twentieth century ravaged entire populations, in particular in British Uganda and the CFS. King Leopold II turned to researchers of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and awakened wider medical attention to sleeping sickness with the installation of a two hundred thousand franc prize for the discovery of a cure, thus cunningly presenting Thomas D’haeninck, Jan Vandersmissen, Gita Deneckere, and Christophe Verbruggen - 9781526151070 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 04/01/2022 03:48:15PM via free access