Henry van Zile Hyde (March 3, 1906 – November 5, 1982) was an American physician and public health official appointed by three presidents to represent the United States in the World Health Organization (WHO) from its inception in 1948 until his retirement in 1962.
Family, education, and early career
Hyde was born on March 3, 1906, into a prominent Syracuse, New York, family. He was the second son of Henry Neal Hyde, an Episcopal priest, and Madeleine van Zile. Hyde graduated from Deerfield Academy in 1925 and from Yale University in 1929. He was a 1933 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Johns Hopkins University Medical School, where he was also elected to Alpha Omega Alpha, the medical honor society. Soon after graduating from medical school, on June 24, 1933, Hyde married Ellen Sedgwick Tracy, also from a prominent Syracuse family.
Hyde served his medical internship at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, and his residency in internal and pulmonary medicine at Strong Memorial Hospital at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York. In 1936 he established a practice of internal medicine in Syracuse. In 1938 he received a diploma from the Trudeau Institute, a center for the study and treatment of tuberculosis in Saranac Lake, New York. Hyde was a diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine and the American Board of Preventive Medicine.
During his first years in medical practice, Hyde was also engaged in pneumonia research for a New York state program, at a time when there was no known cure for pneumonia and when many people succumbed to the disease. Hyde’s work came to the attention of the state health department, and in early 1941 he was appointed chief of the New York State Bureau of Pneumonia Control in Albany, New York – his first venture into public health.
World War II years
Hyde’s arrival in Albany in 1941 coincided with the advent of the American involvement in World War II. Within four months Hyde was recruited into the United States Public Health Service (USPHS), initially at the rank of commander and senior surgeon. He was assigned as the medical director for Region 2 of the Office of Civilian Defense (OCD), a wartime department with responsibilities now covered by the Departments of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. Region 2 encompassed the densely populated areas of New York City, New Jersey and Delaware. At the time, the United States feared an East Coast air or sea attack from German forces. At OCD, Hyde was responsible for all the emergency medical responses, as well as civilian preparedness, in such an event. Along with Eleanor Roosevelt, then the unsalaried assistant director of OCD. Hyde made presentations to medical and hospital professionals and community organizations about the urgency for preparations and the pressing problems surrounding their accomplishment.
In early 1943, at the request of James M. Landus, dean of the Harvard Law School on leave as director of OCD, Hyde went to Washington as chief of the Field Casualty Section. When it was determined that an imminent attack on the US homeland was low, Hyde was assigned to the Foreign Economic Administration and sent to Cairo, Egypt, to head the Medical Division of the Middle East Supply Centre (MESC). The MESC was “an Anglo-American agency that had complete control over the flow of civilian supplies to the Middle East. The Medical Division was concerned with medical and health supplies required by the twenty countries in that region.”
The director of MESC, with whom Hyde worked at that time, was Australian Commander Sir Robert G. A. Jackson. When Jackson went to London to become senior deputy director of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) serving under Herbert Lehman and Fiorello La Guardia, Hyde became chief of the Middle East office of UNRRA. Hyde’s office was responsible for all the refuge camps in the Gaza Strip, the Sinai and North Africa, together totaling over 80,000 refugees from Greece and Yugoslavia. These civilians had been evacuated as part of the Allied ruse to have the Axis powers believe they were going to be invaded through the Balkans and not at the beaches of Normandy.
Hyde served in Cairo from March 1944 until the end of the war, flying home on VJ Day, August 14, 1945; in September of that year he returned to Washington, where he became assistant chief of the Health Services Bureau of the Department of State.