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Un peu d’histoire
La fédération internationale des associations d’étudiants en médecine fut l’une des nombreuses organisations internationales d’étudiants crées juste après la seconde guerre mondiale. Le premier meeting qui vit la création de la fédération eu lieu à Copenhague au Danemark en mai 1951. Les premiers membres de cette nouvelles organisation furent l’angleterre, l’Autriche, l’Allemagne, la Finlande, la Norvége, la Suéde, les Pays-Bas, la Suisse et le Danemark. Londres organisa la première Assemblée Générale de l’IFMSA en juillet 1952. Le meeting comptait alors 30 participants venant de 10 pays différents.
La croissance de l’IFMSA à travers les années a été remarquable. Partant des membres fondateurs, exclusivement européen, la fédération a grossis jusqu’à inclure 97 membres venant du monde entier en soixante ans d’organisation.
L’IFMSA s’est toujours aussi bien concentrée sur la mobilité étudiante et les échanges que sur l’organisation de conférences et de groupes de travail. Les premières conférences furent les conférences sur la clinique internationale étudiante qui furent un succès dans les années cinquante. Divers universités d’été ont été organisées à travers les années, elles débutèrent en 1963 au Danemark, au Royaume Unis et en scandinavie. D’autres conférences ont traité des problèmatiques de l’éducation médicale, des drogues, du VIH et SIDA. Dans les années soixante, des projets furent créés pour aider les étudiants moins privilégiés des pays en voie de dévelopement comme le projet « aide aux livres » qui prévoyait l’envoi de livres médicaux et de matériels en surplus des pays dévelopés vers les pays moins favorisés
Dans les années soixante dix, les étudiants en médecine virent un intérêt dans la décentralisation de l’IFMSA. C’est dans cette obtique que l’IFMSA contribua à la création d’organisations régionales d’étudiants en médecine comme par exemple en Afrique et en Asie. Par la suite, des vice-présidents régionaux ont été élus pour superviser les six régions de l’IFMSA et ceci façon à promouvoir la régionalisation mais cette structure a été abandonnée après quelques années.
Au début des années quatre vingt, l’IFMSA ratifia un certain nombre de résolutions et de déclaration sur des sujets variés en passant de l’éducation médicale à la prévention face à une guerre nucléaire ou encore les soins primaires. À la fin des années 80 une poussée vers l’organisation de projets qui seraient capables d’agir au point de vue local se fit ressentir et ainsi l’idée du Projet du Village Concept Project est né en collaboration avec d’autres organisations d’étudiants internationales. 1986 a aussi vu le début des programmes de formations sur le Leadership en collaboration avec l’Organisation Mondiale de la Santé. Ces programmes de formations sont toujours actifs aujourd’hui.
Les relations officielles avec l’OMS (Organisation Mondiale de la Santé) ont débutés en 1969, la collaboration a permis l’organisation d’un symposium à propos « de l’enseignement médical », ou encore à propos des maladies tropicales. Dans les années suivantes, l’IFMSA et l’OMS ont collaboré dans l’organisation d’un certain nombre d’ateliers et programmes de formation. L’IFMSA travail avec l’UNESCO depuis 1971. Depuis 2007, l’IFMSA est une organisation de soutien officiel de l’HIFA2015 (Healthcare Information For All by 2015 ou Information sur la Santé Pour Tous avant 2015).
Vous trouverez ci-dessous le discours en Anglais donné par Eric Holst, co-fondateur et premier président de l’IFMSA, lors du 50ème anniversaire de l’IFMSA qui s’est tenu au Danemark en 2001. Il relate les débuts de l’IFMSA, dont la France fut l’un des acteurs !
IFMSA - 50 years beyond its start
by Erik Holst MD ; Professor emeritus, University of Copenhagen (Co-Founder and first president of IFMSA)
OPENING ADDRESS AT THE OFFICIAL CELEBRATION OF IFMSA’S 50TH ANNIVERSARY
Ålborg University,
August 6, 2001
Looking back at the earliest beginnings of the IFMSA now fifty years later is a strange voyage back into a completely different world. The war years had for many of us been a time of almost complete international isolation. After the liberation - which came to Denmark in May 1945 after more than five years of foreign military occupation - an immense need for contact with the rest of the world was a dominating feeling not least among the students. This led to the creation of the International Union of Students (IUS) with headquarters in Prague and high hopes for a new world with open borders and genuine international co- operation. However, with the communist take-over in Czechoslovakia in 1948 the high hopes came to a sudden end and the international student movement became highly politicised and was split into an Eastern and a Western part supported - as we were later to find out - by KGB and CIA respectively.
The budding collaboration among medical student’s organisations was also stopped in its tracks. Thus I inherited - as newly elected international secretary of the Medical Student Council at the University of Copenhagen in the fall of 1948 - a letter from the Medical Students Council of Charles’ University in Prague signed by all members of that council. The letter expressed their strong wish for future collaboration with their counterparts in Copenhagen. However, against each name my predecessor had indicated the heavy prison sentences all of them had received after the communist take-over.
That went some way to cool our post-war euphoria about the New World we thought we had come to.
So, giving up on the politicised general international student collaboration the medical students in Copenhagen turned to the more professional and practical aspects of international collaboration. A need for dissection material in Denmark led to the organisation of a first dissection course at the Medical Faculty of the University of Paris for 30 medical students from Copenhagen and Aarhus in the summer of 1950 - we travelled in style by chartered aeroplane and stayed at Cité Universitaire.
This experience led to the creation of the IMCC in the fall of 1950 and a rapid expansion of professional medical student exchange between Denmark and the rest of Europe - including eventually also Czechoslovakia ! We needed, however, an international framework for these activities.
This was first discussed among at a small international meeting in Paris in December 1950, called by the Austrian medical students association where I first met Ralph Gräsbech from Finland who is also here today. The subject was again discussed among the international guests at the annual meeting of French National Medical Student Associations early 1951 in Lille in Northern France. Here I met for the first time the president of the British Medical Students’ Association (BMSA), Rex Crossley. He gained immediate respect among our French student colleagues by winning the beer-drinking contest. We both lost miserably the wine-drinking contest where you had to empty a glass of red wine with a white napkin around
your neck to reveal any drops spilled in the process - which was of course disqualifying. The winner of this test was the editor of the medical students’ journal in Paris, who could accomplish this for us rather demanding task in a single movement - without spilling a drop ! While the Austrians remained with the initiative and became cofounders of the IFMSA, the French medical students never came back to play a direct role in the creation of the IFMSA. But they deserve to be mentioned today as having twice provided the stage 50 years ago for the future close collaboration between BMSA and the Nordic medical student organisations which eventually resulted in creation of IFMSA.
With the initial help of Dr. Johannes Frandsen, then Danish Director of Public Heath we decided to investigate the possibility of making international professional student exchange and other forms international medical students’ activities part of the program of World Health Organisation.
Dr Frandsen suggested that we should visit Geneva during the World Health Assembly in Geneva in May 1951 and talk directly with the WHO. Accordingly I somehow managed to get myself to Geneva for that event. Together with Nus Mendelaar, a fellow medical student from Holland, I obtained an audience with the deputy director general of WHO, Dr. Derolle. We argued as best we could for WHO to take a direct interest in future medical doctors by offering to host a secretariat for international medical student exchange and collaboration e.g. on medical educational and student health issues.
I also had the opportunity to present our ideas to the assembled Nordic Directors of Public Health from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. Everybody was very encouraging and used their influence to obtain support for our ideas but after initial investigations the general feed-back was clear : Before WHO could enter any formal relationship with us we have to get our act together in the form of an international medical student organisation.
Since we got a similar message at home through the Danish Medical Association when we enquired about the possibility of World Medical Association taking international medical students collaboration under their wings we decided to go ahead with such an endeavour.
IMCC therefore called a meeting in the summer of 1951, which took place at Domus Medica in Copenhagen, headquarters of the DMA. Eight countries were represented at that initial meeting : Austria, Denmark, Finland, Great Britain, Holland, Norway, Sweden, and West Germany. A decision was made to create a formal framework for our collaboration and to concentrate on three main issues : Professional medical student exchange, Medical education and Student health.
The only serious divergence that came up during the meeting in Copenhagen was about which name to give this new creation. In the preceding months we got used to think of the future organisation as « World Medical Students’ Association » or « WMSA » analogous to some existing national medical student’ associations like the BMSA.
However, our student colleague from Cologne, West Germany, convinced us by strict German logic, that since we did not plan to have individual student membership but would consist of a number of separate member associations, the new body must be considered a federation rather than an association. Bowing to the irrefutable logic of this argument and in the name of compromise we then took upon us the cross of having to « sell » our initiative under the complicated name of IFMSA. Content was after all more important than form. And I see that people got used to the name with time.
A Provisional Directing Body was set up with Rex Crossley, Great Britain, as chair with a view to call a first Executive Board Meeting, finalise the statutes and call a constituent general assembly in London in 1952. A standing committee on professional exchange -
SCOPE even at that time - was created with Henrik Wulff, IMCC, Denmark, as chair and with the task of organising a first Exchange Officers’ Meeting (EOM) which took place in London in December 1951. Similarly the responsibility for medical education issues - SCOME - was given to Kees van der Kamp, president of the Dutch Medical Students’ Association, who participated as a result of Nus Mendelaar’s effective mobilisation of the home front. The responsibility for student health issues - SCOSH - was handed over to Ralph Gräsbeck, Finland. Finally the task of setting up a general secretariat in Copenhagen was entrusted to Jørgen Falck Larsen, IMCC, Denmark.
Fifty years later you may wonder how all this activity was possible within a single year among a group of medical students who then - as I am sure even now - had a quite heavy study load within a rather tight curriculum. And how did we overcome the financial difficulties involved in covering meeting and travel costs. I think part of the explanation was that so many medical students were attracted to this very practical but at the same time very challenging international work. This was something very different from the sometimes rather boring organisational tasks offered by the local student councils. So, people readily made sacrifices to become and stay members of the team.
Working for IFMSA also gave a larger degree of freedom to make decisions as necessary and there was more room for new and untraditional ideas. And there was a total lack of restraint in relation to authorities whenever we felt that such authorities could and therefore should be of assistance to our ideas. Somehow this proved contaminating since all the high ranking people we approached seemed to find it entirely natural and justified that these young students came straight to them with their demands.
This complete lack of modesty in pursuing our goals had originally developed within IMCC but came to dominate also the attitudes within IFMSA : We were doing some good and useful work, we needed help and we did not have much time to waste on traditional procedures and formalities. Many examples could be given of this phenomenon from the early days of IFMSA. I will just refer to the top-level meetings just described during the WHO Assembly in Geneva in 1951 and to the fact, that the first IFMSA meetings took place in the prestigious « Domus Medica » buildings in both Copenhagen in 1951 and in London 1952.
The spectacular way you have this year carried off your very ambitious decision to celebrate this 50th anniversary in style -with royal patronage and with a large number of outstanding experts joining in - is for me an indication that the medical students of today’s IFMSA still to operate successfully in accordance with to the old slogan : « The impossible we do tomorrow. Miracles may take a little longer ». And the response from on high seems still to be as positive as before.
So, somehow we found the necessary funds to stage annual Exchange Officers Meetings as well as the early general assemblies in London 1952, in Zurich 1953 and in Rome 1954. Even if we tried carefully to escape the political overtones that had destroyed the IUS we still encountered some - even if mainly imagined - political problems.
Our early attempts to involve North America were frustrated by the fear among US medical students of getting involved in anything even remotely « un-American » during the McCarthy period. I remember one of the first US medical students coming to Denmark for a clinical clerkship organised by IMCC. Having understood that free medical services were the main feature of the Danish Health Care System his memorable comment was« This is worse than socialism ». So the Students American Medical Association supported by the American Medical Association could not be persuaded to join the IFMSA. I see now that there is such a thing as IFMSA-USA - and that makes me feel good.
The fact that you have a president from Nepal makes me feel even better since I have come to
know and greatly appreciate some of his countrymen as great colleagues in the global fight against torture. I think this is an indication that IFMSA today has taken upon itself the mission of broadening the aim of medical training to include a concern not just for the individual patient but also for the improvement of health conditions globally.
In this process we must always remember, that physicians do not normally produce health - most of the time we produce care for people who are ill or even dying. This is no small thing. But if we want to produce health we need to ally ourselves with other professions as well as with politicians and the media.
I am therefore pleased to see that IFMSA has taken up serious inter-organisational and inter- professional relationships that may lead to prevention of disease and disability and to improvement of health among the underprivileged and the suppressed. I can only hope that the lessons learnt in your formative years will lead to a future medical paradigm that moves even further beyond the necessary continued concern for individual patients.
As a final remark I want to say that none of us back in 1951 could have imagined that our initiative would stand the test of time to become a natural part of the environment of medical students all over the world. We did it because it made sense at the time and also it was fun doing it.
I believe that it is still seen as something both worthwhile and fun and that is the reason that the idea has survived for half a century now. It is a pleasure and an honour for me to be here today and greet you on behalf of those who witnessed the birth of IFMSA.
We can only express our deepest respect for the impressive IFMSA movement that you have been able to develop from the humble beginnings we somehow managed to create in those days.
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