The pioneer, the activist: an interview with Trevor Hancock.

Ross Graham (RG): What attracted you to public health? Trevor Hancock (TH): After four years of family practice, I was tired of patching people up and sending them back into the war. I wanted to go upstream. This interest was also triggered by my involvement in ecological politics and my work at a health centre in Etobicoke where the majority of patients were on some form of social support. Their problems were clearly not medical problems – they were social and economic problems. As well, in 1996 I returned to a small town in northern Borneo where I had worked as a volunteer 30 years prior. During that trip, I realized that my interests in healthy communities and the ‘beyond health care’ movement were likely founded during that volunteer experience in the 1960s, before I went to medical school. I realized after I came back that their community was in many ways very happy and healthy. They weren’t dying of starvation, and were generally healthy and productive. Yet, they had very little of the so-called ‘benefits’ of western medicine.