Influenced, influencing : Central Europe and public health during the interwar period

Résumé 0

Far from having been neglected, the young countries in Eastern Europe were both a constant driving force in the League of Nations Health Organization and, also, a base of operations for large private philanthropic organizations (with the Rockefeller Foundation in the lead). The health schools and institutes in Danubian Europe operated under the influence of America, but the accomplishments of their “returned fellows” placed them in the limelight and in a position to exercise influence. Regardless of how backward it might have seemed, this region of the continent gradually found its voice owing to the process of “translation/naturalization” that, by making what came from the outside appear to be a native product, made these exemplary accomplishments exportable, all the way to China. From “health police” to “social medicine,” this other Europe laid the ideological basis for the nascent WHO: the revival of rural areas.