Looking Back: Where International Adolescent Health Conferencing Began

David Bennett, IAAH President 1989-1994

With the 12th World Congress fast approaching, it behooves us to reflect upon the origins and significance of the opening gambits. The ‘First International Symposium on Adolescent Medicine’ was convened by Paediatrician Ole Wasz-Hochert in Helsinki, Finland in 1974. The scientific programme had been ‘arranged in cooperation with the Society for Adolescent Medicine’ (SAM), established in 1968. In his opening address, Wasz-Hochert paid homage to Dr J. Roswell Gallagher who, 25 years previously, had sagely pointed out that ‘This age group needs its own experts’. The Proceedings were published in ACTA PAEDIATRICA SCANDINAVICA (Supplement 256 – 1975).

The second symposium was hosted in Washington DC in 1979, by Andrew Rigg and Robert Shearin, the third in 1983 in Jerusalem, Israel by Emmanuel “Manny” Chigier who, together with Roger Tonkin, later established the International Chapter of SAM (and the Israel Society for Adolescent Medicine in 1992). While individually auspiced, these important flow-on events were to pave the way to a more coherent organizationally-motivated approach.

As well as providing important opportunities to commence the broader promotion of adolescent health and healthcare, in different parts of the world, these three ‘inaugural symposia’ also foreshadowed evolving worldwide academic interest in the health and healthcare of adolescents. Topics ranged from a predominantly medical focus in the 1970s to programs that increasingly covered a variety of psychosocial, educational and humanitarian issues, a trend that has continued.

In 1983 in Jerusalem, I had the honour of presenting a bid to convene the Fourth International Symposium on Adolescent Health in Sydney, four years later. This unsolicited bid document had been warmly endorsed en route, by both WHO Head Office in Geneva and the Society for Adolescent Medicine (SAM), and included the ambitious but timely undertaking to establish an International Association for Adolescent Health.

The Australian Association for Adolescent Health (AAAH), established almost a decade earlier, hosted the event in 1987, with SAM as co-sponsor. SAM President Joe Sanders and WHO’s (the late) Herb Friedman, among others, were signatories to the Charter, enabling IAAH to be duly created during the conference. Dr Murray Williams, the only Australian doctor to have trained with Gallagher at his famous clinic in Boston, became our first President.

The 4th Symposium attracted over 300 adult delegates from Australia and 28 other countries, one third of whom were members of disciplines other than medicine. A parallel youth event, ‘Korobra Youth Health Festival’, featured the integration of young people and adult delegates on the final day, the first such happening at an adolescent health conference. ‘New Universals: Adolescent Health in a Time of Change’, the conference proceedings, were published by AAAH the following year.

Gallagher’s legacy was now bearing fruit in ways that could not have been imagined in the 1950s – from humble clinical beginnings to a passionate movement with global reach.