Global Health Histories

MAKING HISTORY WITH WHO

As WHO celebrates its 60th anniversary, the Organization is becoming more aware of not just its own history, but the much broader history of global health across the last six decades – and how it relates to the present and the future.

Based on the principle that understanding the history of health in the last sixty years helps the response to the health challenges of today, in late 2004 WHO established a project called Global Health Histories (GHH). It promotes the concept that learning from history is vital to help shape a healthier future for everyone, especially those most in need.

The project is capturing the interest and engagement of a wide international audience – public health professionals and policy makers, academics, researchers, students and the general public – and sharing with them health knowledge inspired by history.

Global Health Histories is doing this in several ways. First, over the last few years it has been building an international network of health historians with expertise in a wide variety of areas. These range from the postwar origins of WHO itself, the influences on health of the Cold War and the end of colonial era on several continents, to the failure of the global malaria eradication campaign in the 1960s and the successful eradication of smallpox by 1980.

The network now extends to all of WHO’s six regional offices and boasts many of the bestknown names in health history. It is also linked with many leading institutions, such as the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, the National Library of Medicine in the United States of America, and Fundacao Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz), which is attached to the Ministry of Health in Brazil.

Many historians in the network have come to WHO in Geneva to give lectures on aspects of their work. They have discussed the role of the Organization in the history of global health, examined health and social change in countries such as Russia and South Africa, and looked at health propaganda and public information, from early documentaries to more sophisticated film-making. The historians have also traced the Organization’s part in fighting the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and even probed into the history of evolutionary biology.

Furthermore, they have challenged WHO’s own view of itself in relation to its work on primary health care. This coincides with the 30th anniversary of the international conference in Alma-Ata (now Almaty), Kazakhstan, in 1978 that led to the adoption of primary health care – “health for all” – in many countries. Today, a reinvigoration of primary health care is one of WHO’s key new policies.

20th November 2008
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