Medicine and Health in the European Dream

Abstract

The primary purpose of this publication is to show some fundamental links between health, medicine, democracy, and the new Europe rebuilt after 1945. The European health system is connected to the Enlightenment and its universalistic ideas. A universalistic health system includes all individuals, regardless of wealth, culture, race, gender, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, or other distinguishing features. My final point is to support the EU's universalism, which has frequently been controversial; it can be maximized by the digital revolution rather than minimized due to the high and growing costs of medical care. These pages were born from a project aimed to assess the public health changes from the perspective of the upheavals caused by COVID-19. The research project involved the collection of documentation, with interviews and fieldwork, to highlight the response capabilities to the pandemic, particularly in the Italian healthcare system, the first to be affected in the West. The interviews were conducted in various countries, and all the documentation was considered from a comparative perspective. These pages constitute an intermediate research report with a view to final publication. In my presentation, I will also delve deeper into a previous project ("EU and Turkey: Connecting Identities, Bridging Cultures") that was launched in 2008 with the support of the European Union and started together with the German universities of Heidelberg and Ludwigsburg and various universities in Turkey. At the various stages of my inquiry, I have published many books and articles on different themes (Gammone, 2021, 2018, 2015; Gammone and Sidoti, 2012).