Health beyond borders

As a young doctor, Edgar Widmer answered the call to Africa—and became a defining figure in Swiss development cooperation. Between Ifakara and Switzerland, he shaped SolidarMed for decades, built networks, and fought for medical care that truly reaches people worldwide.

Edgar Widmer was Vice-President of SolidarMed for 16 years, travelling between worlds and people in this role. He was a man with a mission. He studied medicine at the universities of Fribourg, Vienna and Basel. He passed his state examination in 1960 and then worked in the fields of surgery and anaesthesia at Lucerne Cantonal Hospital. But the world was calling – and so, a few years later, the young doctor set off for Tanganyika, which had just gained independence and would soon be renamed Tanzania.

Edgar Widmer worked for almost three years as an assistant doctor at St. Francis Hospital in Ifakara. His time in Ifakara laid the foundation for his later role as a networker and driving force in Swiss development cooperation. 

As Vice-President of SolidarMed, he ensured that a Swiss section of Medicus Mundi was established. In 1969, SolidarMed joined Medicus Mundi Internationalis. This allowed Edgar Widmer – on behalf of SolidarMed – to initiate the founding of Medicus Mundi Switzerland (MMS) and he became president of this section. Later, Widmer also took over the presidency of Medicus Mundi Internationalis.

Edgar Widmer recognised that preparation for assignments abroad needed to focus more on public health aspects. The message about medicine in developing countries spread, and with it grew a network of doctors who were willing to put their knowledge at the service of global health.

SolidarMed was able to get the SDC to carry out an evaluation of the hospital in 1977/78. This laid the foundation for a long-standing collaboration between SolidarMed and the SDC in Tanzania – and made SolidarMed the project exectuting agency for the expansion of health institutions.

Edgar Widmer found himself involved in a programmatic shift from cutting-edge missionary medicine to medicine for developing countries. These experiences formed the basis for a grassroots medical revolution which – similar to today's UN sustainability goals – was intended to be relevant not only for countries in the Global South.

In Switzerland, Widmer, Ebner (Former Successor to the SolidarMed Presidency), Otto Studer (then president of the FMH), SDC health expert Immita Cornaz, several cantonal doctors and the head of the Swiss Nursing Association put primary health care on the political agenda. Nevertheless, health policy in Switzerland took a different path.

But PHC did not have an easy time in the Global South either. Widmer wrote at the time: “The PHC concept was revolutionary. But politicians and church leaders preferred to show themselves off in the glamour of a large hospital rather than in front of a simple health centre.”

Ebner and Widmer introduced new topics in medicine and fundamentally changed the way SolidarMed worked. Medicines were no longer sent to Africa haphazardly, and financial support was no longer promised without consideration of development policy. SolidarMed saw it as its responsibility to raise awareness of development policy among the medical profession and to contribute specialist knowledge to Switzerland's development cooperation.

Widmer's tireless commitment and his travels created a new network that also benefited SolidarMed. He was committed to a form of medicine that was not driven by commercial interests but by the desire to heal. Widmer published a collection of his lectures and publications under the title Advocate for Health for All.