International Medical Corps

The establishment of International Medical Corps in 1984 was a development that had global significance, not because it added another name to the pool of international relief agencies, but because it boldly declared the emergence of a new kind of relief agency. By providing health care through training, International Medical Corps challenged— indeed, changed—the very definition of relief. The emergence of a new kind of humanitarian agency International Medical Corps was founded by Dr. Robert Simon, who, as a young emergency-room physician at UCLA Medical Center, was moved to take action after reading of the tragic plight of the Afghan people as a result of the 1979 Soviet invasion and subsequent occupation. All but 200 of the country’s 1,500 doctors had been executed, imprisoned, or exiled, and all relief agencies had been ordered out of the country, leaving ill and injured civilians, pregnant women and developing children with essentially nowhere to turn for basic health care. Simon began making trips to Afghanistan to provide medical assistance directly to civilians. But he also saw that the problem was much too big for one person to tackle, and he spent much of the summer of 1984 contacting international humanitarian agencies about setting up operations in Afghanistan. To his dismay, each explained that their mandates did not allow them to work in country. So in September 1984, he founded International Medical Corps, knowing that it would need to take a different approach to relief. “I saw right away that a few little clinics weren’t going to amount to much,” Simon recalls. “The real problem for the Afghans was how to reconstruct their entire medical system. Something more had to be done.”