Early on September 11, 2013, Hans Rosling called me to ask if we could do our interview at his home in Uppsala. Hans had been lecturing late the night before in Stockholm to students at Stockholm university on the environment and wanted to spend the day at home. I didn’t realise how important home was to him until we arrived.
The Roslings lived in a modest radhus (terraced house) development, one of many found all over Sweden. Hans opened the door to the photographer and me, and his wife, Agneta, a psychiatrist, offered us coffee and pepparkakor.
The hallway was crammed full of books, a grandson’s paintings drying on the dining room table. Apart from a few African carvings, there was little evidence of his extraordinary global career as so many things – statistician, TED and t.v. presenter, edutainer, challenger of orthodoxy and complacency, professor of public health, doctor.
Until he opened up his laptop to back up a point he was making with statistics, he did not mention Gapminder, the online free statistical site that his son Ola and daughter-in-law Anna persuaded him to set up with them. Google now owns the source code behind Gapminder’s Trendalyzer for the software, for which it paid the Gapminder foundation, a charitable organisation, an undisclosed sum.
In fact, the house where Hans lived with Agneta is very close to the tile factory where his paternal grandfather worked and the tiny hamlet where his father grew up. Hans and Agneta were at the same school but sat in the classrooms next to each other.
“And then from the age of 13, we were always in the same classroom, and when we left school, we lived together ever since,” he added.
After leaving school, Hans qualified as a doctor, Agneta a midwife. In 1972 they went to Asia for six months, backpacking and studying in Bangalore alongside students on a public health programme, in factories and remote areas. They then trekked in Nepal before working at the university hospital in Bangkok and then Indonesia. This, said Agneta, was the turning point for Hans.
He realised that the traditional way of looking at the world in terms of East-West and developed-underdeveloped just weren’t appropriate. He also realised that “the West” – a phrase he challenged me to define – would not dominate the world much longer. It kindled what he described as “an obsession with public health” and his curiosity in how the rest of the world lived. His view of the world rested on the understanding that people everywhere are just like you and me.
“The people of Indonesia want a home like this, they want to have two taps in the bathroom, one for hot and one for cold water. They want to have a refrigerator; they want to have a washing machine. That’s the basics,” he argued.
Although much of his work focused on public health, including his discovery of the parasite that caused Konzo fever, or tired leg syndrome, in the Congo, it was the challenge of climate change that he returned to repeatedly throughout our conversation. “The problem is that when Britain burns coal, the problem arises in Bangladesh. When Russia burns coal, the problem arises in China,“ he said. Global governance on climate change was the only way forward, in his view.
Hans stopped practicing as a medical doctor on Midsummer Eve, 1983, when he inserted a pacemaker for the last time. I asked him how he had dealt with some of the suffering he had seen over the years, particularly in parts of India and Africa. He replied that he saw the problems of human beings as part of the world, like a pathologist dealing with death. “Greed causes me much more suffering than extreme poverty, because when I see extreme poverty, I feel like this: “Let’s get something done, yes?” He did however say that when he saw conspicuous consumption, as a social democrat he immediately saw an opportunity to raise tax revenue for social services.
Did he believe in God? No, he said, not for the last three decades, not after performing five grim operations to save the lives of women with stillborn babies.
After almost four hours, Agneta reminded him gently that if they didn’t leave soon, they would the chance to eat lunch at the nearby school. I’d been trying to wind things up for at least an hour because he was looking tired, but it was impossible to stop him talking on any occasion. But he clearly listened to Agneta. As they cycled off together, the world-famous professor and his eminent wife looked one of the most contented couples in the world. I have thought of that image so many times since hearing Hans had died.
Heather Farmbrough is an award-winning freelance journalist and editor. A former staff writer for the Financial Times, Heather has written for Weekend FT, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Management Today, The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, Healthy and other magazines. Heather specialises in business, travel and lifestyle features. She has edited business and travel magazines for Orange, The Co-operative Travel, Hamptons International, Baillie Gifford & Co, RIAS, Lloyds Bank and IBM.