Communications professor Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale traces patriotic correctness in the wake of 9/11.
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Caribbean odyssey |
Foundation laid groundwork for global health promotion, historian writes |
Launching a campaign to cure hookworm disease in Latin America and the Caribbean in the early part of the 20th century never had the intended effect of Americanizing the third world, but it did lay the groundwork for a global network of public health operations.
The Rockefeller Foundation, which sunk the modern day equivalent of billions of dollars into health promotion programs, is the subject of a new book by Steven Palmer, a Canada Research Chair in the history of international health.
It was “the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation of its day, times a thousand,” Dr. Palmer said, but was criticized by some as “the advance guard of U.S. imperialism” and a tool to create a third world labour force dependent on a biomedicine system headquartered in the United States.
“The notion of 'civilizing' people according to an American model was just silly, and it didn’t happen,” said Palmer, an associate professor in history. “But the people of Latin America and the Caribbean took advantage of the opportunity and transformed it to fit their own public health agenda.”
Launching Global Health: The Caribbean Odyssey of the Rockefeller Foundation,published by the University of Michigan Press, traces the history ofthe International Health Commission, the foundation’s flagship which Palmer said was “a laboratory for discovering and testing the elements of a global health system for the 20th century.”
The commission established a pilot hookworm program in British Guiana in 1914 and within a year had initiated operations in Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Trinidad. However, health care officials in those countries already had methods of treating hookworm disease—a parasite which normally enters the body through tissue in the feet and can cause serious anemia if left untreated—and integrated the Rockefeller Foundation programs into their own public health agendas, Palmer said.
“It created structures and the beginnings of global knowledge about the problems, benefits and mistakes in trying to improve the health of the world’s poorest people,” he said. “It allowed local experts—doctors, teachers and community activists—the resources and legitimacy to pursue local projects that they might otherwise not have been able to. These groups practically invented NGOs and the World Health Organization. In fact, the Rockefeller Foundation basically became the WHO after the Second World War.”
Palmer—who also runs Cultures of Health, a Web site which provides an eclectic mix of sources about the cultural dimensions of disease, health and medicine—said the book will be of interest to historians of global philanthropy and students of international health and global institutions.
“This story demonstrates the important intersections of philanthropy, tropical medicine, public health, and geopolitics during a formative period, and provides a historical road map for thinking about contemporary struggles against AIDS, malaria, and many more infectious diseases in developing regions of the world," said Alexandra Minna Stern, associate director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan.