Kumanan Rasanathan, public health physician and Executive Director of the Geneva-based Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research, quotes the 19th-century physician and polymath Rudolf Virchow, who famously suggested that “medicine is a social science, and politics nothing more than medicine on a large scale”. Rasanathan, in addition to his medical qualification, has a degree in politics and a master's in public health. In retrospect, he describes Virchow's aphorism as “one of the key principles of my career”, explaining that “to have trained in medicine, politics, and public he...