[citation needed] 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.
[2] 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).
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.
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.
[5] After working for the MESC, Hyde insisted that a Middle Eastern delegate be invited, a proposal with which his British colleagues did not initially agree.
Thomas Parran represented the United States at the TPC meeting, with Henry van Zile Hyde as his alternate.
[9] Working on the sub-committee for the preamble, Hyde collaborated closely with Brock Chisholm and Szeming Sze, who claimed authorship of the now very famous first principle, namely that “health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”[10] Three months after the Paris meetings, in June 1946, the International Health Conference was convened in New York with representatives of all fifty-one-member nations of the UN attending.
Among them, an Interim Commission (IC) was set up to “make preparations for the First World Health Assembly, to carry on without interruption the surviving activities of the League of Nations Health Organization and those of the Office International d’Hygieve Publique (OIHP) and UNRRA, and to perform other urgent duties pending the final establishment of the Organization.”[11] Thomas Parran was designated a member of the IC with Hyde as his alternate.
During Hyde’s tenure as the American representative to the WHO, he focused much of his attention on malaria eradication, with the idea that post-WWII states would develop more quickly with a healthy workforce.
[12] While some have argued that the WHO’s malaria campaigns in the 1950s were a form of Cold War politics,[13] none of this discourse exists in any of Hyde’s published writings or personal letters.
Markov and Butrov then met with Surgeon General Leroy Burney and Hyde to prepare proposals for continuing and expanding the scientific exchange program to be considered by Khrushchev and President Eisenhower at their upcoming Camp David meeting.
[18] On December 26, 1962, just two months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Hyde was contacted by the American Red Cross to serve on a special mission to Cuba.
While at AAMC, Hyde was organizer and on the steering committee for the Institute on International Medical Education’s conference, “Manpower for the World’s Health,” convened in Washington, D.C., in March 1966, and editor of its subsequent journal.
He was one of the moving forces behind that organization’s first international conference, “Population Change: A Strategy for Physicians” held in Stockholm in September 1974, which addressed the issue of “mounting global concern over the precarious balance between population growth and the world’s space and resources…and the medical profession’s unique technical and leadership potential.”[21] Hyde was the executive director of WFME at the time of his death in Bethesda, Maryland on November 5, 1982.