For Your Health and Ours

At the end of the First World War, a group of eastern European physicians built a case that politics begins with the body and with health. Their arguments, and above all their actions in supporting new states by creating local healthcare, made the notion of health as a fundamental human right possible.A democratic country is responsible for the health of its people, which means addressing social, economic, and environmental problems as well as disease narrowly considered. These doctors began from this premise, and they understood that disease and efforts to improve health did not stop at borders. They came from a certain milieu, in a certain place, but their experiments quickly became global. From the edges of Europe, these reformers sought colleagues in other post-imperial spaces, in other agrarian regions, and amongst others fighting for health and a political voice. They built a global health network based on principles of social democracy, social medicine, and anti-imperialism. Their story, from the Balkans, to China, to Tennessee, is the history of forgotten origins of global health. The pioneering work of a close-knit group became projects and institutions. Their values became the language of the World Health Organization and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Like all human rights, the right to health was aspirational. But it was more than rhetorical. The interwar eastern European health experts and their global network practiced health as a right locally, nationally, and internationally. The Cold War broke the will for a global right to health, but their legacy lived on in initiatives from the Global South and in the hopes of a younger generation. Drawing on material from archives in seven countries, For Your Health and Ours is a wide-ranging, timely, and innovative new history of the foundations of global health and practices of human rights