Based on extensive archival research, this study examines the role of the Rockefeller Foundation and the League of Nations in improving public health during the interwar period. Barona argues that the Foundation applied a model of business efficiency to its ideology of spreading good health, creating a revolution in public health practice.
Based on extensive archival research, this study examines the role of the Rockefeller Foundation and the League of Nations in improving public health during the interwar period. Barona argues that the Foundation applied a model of business efficiency to its ideology of spreading good health, creating a revolution in public health practice.
The classic case for why government must support science—with a new essay by physicist and former congressman Rush Holt on what democracy needs from science today Science, the Endless Frontier is recognized as the landmark argument for the essential role of science in society and government’s responsibility to support scientific endeavors. First issued when Vannevar Bush was the director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development during the Second World War, this classic remains vital in making the case that scientific progress is necessary to a nation’s health, security, and prosperity. Bush’s vision set the course for US science policy for more than half a century, building the world’s most productive scientific enterprise. Today, amid a changing funding landscape and challenges to science’s very credibility, Science, the Endless Frontier resonates as a powerful reminder that scientific progress and public well-being alike depend on the successful symbiosis between science and government. This timely new edition presents this iconic text alongside a new companion essay from scientist and former congressman Rush Holt, who offers a brief introduction and consideration of what society needs most from science now. Reflecting on the report’s legacy and relevance along with its limitations, Holt contends that the public’s ability to cope with today’s issues—such as public health, the changing climate and environment, and challenging technologies in modern society—requires a more capacious understanding of what science can contribute. Holt considers how scientists should think of their obligation to society and what the public should demand from science, and he calls for a renewed understanding of science’s value for democracy and society at large. A touchstone for concerned citizens, scientists, and policymakers, Science, the Endless Frontier endures as a passionate articulation of the power and potential of science.
A history of the World Health Organization, covering major achievements in its seventy years while also highlighting the organization's internal tensions. This account by three leading historians of medicine examines how well the organization has pursued its aim of everyone, everywhere attaining the highest possible level of health.
Exchanges between different cultures and institutions of learning have taken place for centuries, but it was only in the twentieth century that such efforts evolved into formal programs that received focused attention from nation-states, empires and international organizations. Global Exchanges provides a wide-ranging overview of this underresearched topic, examining the scope, scale and evolution of organized exchanges around the globe through the twentieth century. In doing so it dramatically reveals the true extent of organized exchange and its essential contribution for knowledge transfer, cultural interchange, and the formation of global networks so often taken for granted today.
This book offers a discussion about the dramatic development of healthcare business around the world during the twentieth century. Through a broad range of cases in Asia, Europe and the US, it shows how health was transformed into a fast-growing and diversified industry. Health and medicine have developed as one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy around the world during the twentieth century. However, very little is known about the conditions of their transformation in a big, globalized business. This book discusses the development of health industries, tackling the various activities in manufacturing (drugs, biotechnology, medical devices, etc.), infrastructure (hospital design and construction) and services (nursing care, insurances, hospital management, etc.) in relation to healthcare. The business history of health carried out in this book offers a systemic perspective that includes the producers (companies), practitioners (medical doctors) and users (patients and hospitals) of medical technology, as well as the providers of capital and the bodies responsible for regulating the health system (government). The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Business History.
Based on extensive archival research, this study examines the role of the Rockefeller Foundation and the League of Nations in improving public health during the interwar period. Barona argues that the Foundation applied a model of business efficiency to its ideology of spreading good health, creating a revolution in public health practice.