Dr. June Osborne, president of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, a philanthropy working for better medical education, said Dr. Mann developed working relations between the W.H.O. and 155 countries.

''He got the developing countries to buy, for at least a time, the idea that we really had a common cause -- to work on this deadly epidemic,'' said Dr. Osborne, who worked with Dr. Mann throughout his career.

Eventually, Dr. Mann's zeal on the issue brought him into conflict with the W.H.O. director general, Dr. Hiroshi Nakajima, and, in March 1990, Dr. Mann resigned. He went on to raise the point that improvements in health methods, instruments and technology would not alone solve world health issues. Instead, he said, many diseases and other health problems are rooted in social issues like education and the status of women and in the continuing violations of human rights.

Dr. Mann, with money and assistance from Albina du Boisrouvray, whose son died on a medical mission in Africa, founded and became first director of the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard University School of Public Health, where he founded the Health and Human Rights journal. He also organized the first world conference on health and human rights, at Harvard in 1996.

''Jonathan was a critical player in this new field,'' Dr. Tarantola said, ''bringing together two worlds that had never spoken to each other: the world of doctors and scientists and medical officials, with the world of human rights activists and lawyers. They had two completely different jargons, and there was at first only cacophony. But now they speak.''

Dr. Mann loved the role of founder, and when Allegheny University in Philadelphia gave him the chance to become the first dean of a new school of public health, he seized it. He started in January.

Dr. James Curran, dean of the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta, hired Dr. Mann for a Centers for Disease Control project near the beginning of Dr. Mann's career. The job was to go to one of the hottest spots of the AIDS epidemic in Africa, in what was then Zaire, to found a program surrounded by suspicion, hostility and little chance of success, Project SIDA in Kinshasa. Dr. Mann had never worked on AIDS, but the project became regarded as the most innovative and important center of AIDS research in Africa, until it was dissolved by President Mobutu Sese Seko in 1991.