Abstract
To gain control and domination over a particular territory, medicine was often used as a tool for promoting different interests. Using the activities of the League of Nations Health Organization and the Rockefeller Foundation on the territory of China in 1930s, this paper analyses the interconnection of the international and local factors in the transformation of the traditional Chinese milieu to suit the new and trendy public health projects. These activities were conducted not only to improve the public health conditions in the country, but also to introduce the Chinese public health to the processes of internationalization and standardization to the west oriented type of medicine and medical education. Initiated processes necessarily interfered with the political influences, economical interests and cultural environment as well as with military actions in this very turbulent time of Chinese history. Public health activities were carried out by the group of international experts. Among them the main position took two Croatian physicians: Andrija Štampar (one of the founders of the World Health Organisation later) and Berislav Borčić (a director of the School of Public Health in Zagreb). On the basis of correspondence between these two physicians, as well as the travel diary of Andrija Štampar, this essay presents some less known details about the situation in China and the interlacing between politics and medicine.
Highlights
To gain control and domination over a particular territory, medicine was often used as a tool for promoting different interests
Their collaboration went back to the early 1920s, when the newly founded League of Nations and its Health Organization (LNHO) threw itself with great enthusiasm into the fight against epidemics and the establishment of international public health standards
Under the auspices of the Zagreb School of Public Health, the Kingdom saw the emergence of comprehensive programmes based on popular health education using a variety of methods: lectures, courses, film screenings, public health events, as well as the involvement of local communities into various preventative programmes targeted towards the improvement of public and private hygiene, and the interruption of the chain of infectious disease transmission.[22]
Summary
To gain control and domination over a particular territory, medicine was often used as a tool for promoting different interests. This essay uses archival documents kept in the Croatian State Archives in Zagreb and the Archives of the LNHO in Geneva to illuminate certain hitherto little explored details of this comprehensive project of the Nationalist China, supported by the international community It focuses on the work of two key experts whose role was to put the League of Nations Chinese plans into action: Berislav Borčić and Andrija Štampar. For more on the projects of the Rockefeller Foundation in tise and tenacity, formed the foundations of Rajchman’s plans for China It was a dream team: Borčić and Štampar[18] for the League and Gunn for the Rockefeller Foundation: a line-up that produced a miracle in the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes that awed the entire international community in the 1920s.
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