Brock Chisholm

[9] In 1915 during the First World War, age 18, Chisholm joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force, serving in the 15th Battalion, CEF as a cook, sniper, machine gunner and scout.

[2][4][5][6][7] The full citation for his Military Cross appeared in The London Gazette in March 1918 and reads as follows: For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty.

[11]After the war, Chisholm pursued his lifelong passion of medicine, earning his MD from the University of Toronto by 1924 before interning in England, where he specialized in psychiatry.

During this time, Chisholm developed his strong view that children should be raised in an "as intellectually free environment" as possible, independent of the prejudices and biases (political, moral and religious) of their parents.

Refusing re-election, he occupied the post until 1953, during which time the WHO dealt successfully with a cholera epidemic in Egypt, malaria outbreaks in Greece and Sardinia, and introduced shortwave epidemic-warning services for ships at sea.

[13][14] As a result, for the first time in human history, a World Constituent Assembly convened to draft and adopt the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.

Calls for his resignation as Deputy Minister of Health were quelled by his appointment as Executive Secretary of the WHO, but his public perception as "Canada's most famously articulate angry man" lingered.

In their Facebook post, this fact-checker was highly critical of Chisholm's strongly-felt view "that 'morality' and the 'poisonous certainties' fed to us by our 'parents, Sunday school teachers, priests' and others should be thrown away in favor of SELF-directed 'intellectual freedom'.

[4][7] One reviewer of John Farley's biography[8] lauded Chisholm's visionary ideas and asserted that "his worthy legacy does honor to Canada".

"[21] At his death, the New York Times remembered Chisholm as a "small-town doctor who became director general of the World Health Organization" and also called him "Prophet of Disaster.

Chisholm as a captain in the Canadian Expeditionary Force at the end of World War I.