Marcos Cueto, a widely published medical historian, presents an appealing and well-documented narrative that describes the origins of public health and the creation of PAHO and culminates with the Organization's response to globalization and its commitment to the Millennium Development Goals. The history of PAHO's institutional heritage, notes the author, is "a rich testimony to the depth and breadth of health's value . . . as an indispensable requirement for peace, security, tolerance, and solidarity . . . and a means of achieving equity . . . in all social spheres."
Marcos Cueto is professor in the School of Public Health at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima, Peru, and editor of Missionaries of Science: The Rockefeller Foundation and Latin America (Indiana University Press, 1994).
Reviews
It is not overstating the case to say that this account may be seen as a model of how to approach the "internationalization of medicine"... this study shows the indisputable significance of the Pan-American Health Organization in the fight against disease.... By reconstructing history from the perspective of science, [this work] offers new and exciting visions and contributes to the enrichment of our understanding of the history of the Americas in the twentieth century. --HISTORIA, 2005A lively and engaging account that portrays the trajectory of the Pan-American Health Organization as that of an entity simultaneously producing, and produced by, the politico-socio-economic scenario of the American continent and also shaped by innovations in the medico-biological field. --CADERNOS DE SAUDE PUBLICA, 2005
