Guest Post by visiting fellow Heidi Tworek, University of British Columbia
I had the good fortune and great privilege of spending a month as a visiting fellow at the Reluctant Internationalists project earlier this year. As someone who has only recently started to work on the history of health, I found our discussions tremendously helpful for understanding how to think about health as an international phenomenon. One of the main recurring questions throughout our discussions revolved around the place of health in international interactions. What, if anything, made health different from other international concerns like labour, communications, war or trade?
Health stood for me as an area that bureaucrats often designated as “technical” to enable broader participation in health-related organisations. The designation of “technical” allowed experts to claim that health concerns existed beyond politics and could thus include non-members of international organisations.
In the interwar period, countries like Germany or the Soviet Union were critical players in the League of Nations Health Organisation. Germany continued to send out epidemiological bulletins over wireless after Hitler rescinded the country’s membership of the League in October 1933. The Rockefeller Foundation provided the majority of funding for the Health Organisation, even though the United States never joined the League. Similarly, David Brydan’s recent PhD thesis has shown how Spanish health officials remained deeply involved in the World Health Organisation although Spain was not allowed to join the United Nations until 1955. Disease crossed borders and did not discriminate between members and non-members of an international body. Despite political differences, nation-states often recognised that and cooperated accordingly.
Our discussions about how labels like “technical” enabled broader participation in health matters reminded me of my earlier work on the history of communications, where the label had performed a similar function. Calling communications standards “technical” enabled officials from the nineteenth centuries onwards to reach agreements about cross-border connections. A special issue that I co-edited for Journal of Policy History found that communications standards have succeeded historically when they regulated technical issues like frequencies, but not when they tried to regulate content.
If I apply that distinction back to the history of health, it implies that standardisation in health was likelier to occur when officials could designate something as “technical” (like causes of death) than when it required agreement on broader social issues. Social issues took health out of the purportedly technical into the very definitely political.
What made health different than communications was the very obvious stakes of life or death. In this sense, health was more like war. Health and war have long been linked metaphorically. We talk about “battling” disease or the “war on AIDS.” Conversely, health metaphors are tremendously virulent. We talk about the “health” of the economy or memes going “viral” online. These metaphors had real consequences. Robert Peckham’s work has shown, for example, how the metaphor of contagion in financial crises affected assessments of risk and responses to stock market crashes. Within the world of the military, some countries stopped supplying health data to the League of Nations around 1940 because they feared that the information could be misused by enemy nations for war planning.
Health, then, could be both as “technical” as communications standards and as “political” as war. By comparing health with other areas of internationalism, we gain a far more nuanced picture of how, when, and why cross-border interactions made reluctant experts into enthusiastic participants or vice versa.
Workshop Report – Writing “Outsiders” into the History of International Public Health, Birkbeck 27-28 October 2016
The Reluctant Internationalists project is currently involved in a number of initiatives aimed at equipping history teachers with resources and support. The project team, in collaboration with the Historical Association, are currently creating teaching resources for the history of the Cold War as part of the 
The 20th century was a period of extremes, of contrasts and contradictions. It witnessed destructive wars, and yet periods of unprecedented peace. Increasing wealth was joined by higher levels of poverty. There was scientific and technological progress, but also inhumanity and repression. The map was one of the century’s principal objects. Thanks to developments in geography education, cheaper and quicker mapmaking processes, and increasing travel and migration, maps became common, trusted and powerful things in western society. Yet maps were not passive or neutral objects. They were agents of change, presenting only versions of reality, not the reality itself. They were capable of informing, but also misleading. They were tools of control and of protest, and even changed the world.
As previously announced, the Reluctant Internationalists are organising a series of walking tours around London showcasing the city as the home of international projects and presenting London as a magnet for international collaboration and a laboratory of ideas. The first of these walking tours will explore London in wartime and will be led by Dr Jessica Reinisch.
Each walking tour will explore a particular international network or project that took shape in London. Each walk will last around an hour and a half.
