Description

For Your Health and Ours: An Eastern European History of Global Health

This presentation argues that the practice of positive action in global health and the concept of a universal human right to health originated in association with one another from a reciprocal relationship between eastern European state-building and the growth of international institutions following the First World War. This context oriented international health practices toward supporting states in recognizing health as the result of a broad range of activities, and enacting a public responsibility for those activities. Beyond producing a model of global health, principles and methods that took form from these practices made it possible for the World Health Organization and the United Nations to articulate health as a right in the 1940s. Unlike other human rights these bodies recognized, the right to health was more than rhetoric and aspirations. It was the legacy of presuming that human security was the object of, and required, cooperation between international institutions and states.