This article is part of our 55th Anniversary blog series. To learn more, visit our 55th Anniversary page. In 1960, after treating a seriously ill Canadian traveller in Rome, Dr Vincenzo Marcolongo began to create a worldwide network of doctors committed to helping travellers. He coordinated English-speaking doctors who had been trained in North America and were practising in Europe and then assembled their contact information into a passport-sized booklet. The first IAMAT Medical Directory was born. The first edition of the Medical Directory was just a few pages long, but quickly expanded to include physicians from major cities around the world. The Medical Directory was an innovation, uniting physicians to standardize care and raise physicians’ awareness of the ...

This article is part of our 55th Anniversary blog series. To learn more, visit our 55th Anniversary page. It all started with a painkiller. The incident that spurred Dr. Vincenzo Marcolongo to dedicate his life to travellers’ health occurred in Rome in 1960. Norma Beecroft, a Canadian music student studying in Rome, had been prescribed the painkiller aminopyrine by an Italian physician. Within a few weeks of starting the painkiller, Beecroft became seriously ill. Unbeknownst to her physician, the painkiller was destroying her white blood cells, causing acute leukopenia. By the time she was referred to Dr. Marcolongo by a non-English speaking colleague, her condition had dramatically deteriorated. Dr. Marcolongo, an English-speaking Italian physician, had trained in Montreal and ...