Global Health Histories

MAKING HISTORY WITH WHO

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.

Apart from the seminars, WHO has published a new volume of its own official history – “The Third Ten Years”. This is a sequel to two existing volumes that together span the first twenty years of the Organization. The author is Dr Socrates Litsios, a retired senior scientist at WHO and a historian in his own right. He has spent much of the last three years immersing himself in the official records and archive documents of the Organization, interviewing former colleagues and tracking down other sources in order to write the book.

A collection of oral histories is being prepared through extensive, carefully-structured interviews with leading figures in many of the most important health events of the world in the last sixty years. These are being recorded and transcribed and will be archived for posterity and made available to historians, researchers and others, with the potential also to be published or broadcast. This work is being led former WHO librarian Mrs Carole Modis on behalf of the Association of Former Staff Members.

“For years we tried to raise awareness at WHO of the importance of historical and archival information and its value to current decisions,” she says. “A first step was when WHO hired a qualified archivist. “Then the establishment of the GHH initiative made it possible for the first time to have a coherent and ongoing programme with the necessary resources. The Association of Former WHO Staff appreciates in particular the manner in which GHH has been able to find ways to use the encyclopedic expertise of retired WHO staff and has promoted the recognition of their contribution to the cause of global public health.”

4 November 2009
Tropical diseases: lessons from history: How malaria became a vector borne disease
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