This paper shows first how the League of Nations Health Organisation (LNHO) created the first international standards for measuring the effects of crises on health during the Great Depression. I build on the work of Iris Borowy and Paul Weindiling who had shown that sociomedical indicators were introduced in that endeavor. I highlight how the LNHO faced two contentious indicators that showed contradictory results: mortality rates which were declining during the Slump and sociomedical indicators which showed an increase in malnutrition and illness; and how the LNHO reached a consensus given these diverse criteria and results. Second, I will explore the ensuing international debates concerning the study of the effects of crises and health up until the crisis that unfolded in 2008. I will focus on what can be named as the ‘Brenner’ debate. The American economist and sociologist Harvey Brenner set the controversy in a series of papers in the 1970s where he argued that economic crises cause rise in mortality rates with a lag. Health experts and the newer economists of health working in the US and Europe have been debating Harvey's methods and results ever since presenting opposite outcomes: that it is in times of economic booms that mortality rates increases. The debate is far from over. What makes this case interesting is the fact that the media and policy makers had given far much more attention to Brenner's conclusions or similar since he first published his papers. Relying on the theoretical insights of the sociology of scientific knowledge and the history of quantification and statistics, I identify the way scientists in the US and Europe have forged methods and reached contradictory explanations linking economic crises and health since the Great Depression and the way they argue that ‘science’, ‘objectivity’, and ‘quantitative methods’ are on their side.