4 - The League of Nations Health Organisation

Summary

An elite of biomedical and health specialists functioning through the League of Nations Health Organisation (LNHO) in the interwar decades contributed to the development of the public health profession. They served as a co-ordinating body — a sort of executive committee — for a worldwide biomedical/public health episteme that recently had acquired confidence in its ability to alleviate human suffering by reducing, if not eliminating, disease. This new confidence reflected new consensual knowledge about the aetiology and epidemiology of many diseases and the physiological conditions and socio-economic factors contributing to human illness. It stimulated their humanitarian instincts, leading them to devise the LNHO, a novel institution at the centre of the interwar health regime. This regime had the unusual quality of being largely self-transforming in response to new scientific knowledge developed within the episteme. It also led to the creation in various countries of new national health institutions.

Health co-operation before 1919

During much of the nineteenth century, little consensual knowledge existed about the causes of illness or how diseases are transmitted. The social devastation and fear generated by plague and cholera, nevertheless, induced some governments to seek protection against epidemics emanating from the Middle and Far East and Asia Minor. Diverse, arbitrary, and often contradictory opinions about these diseases prevented effective action.