Improving public health amidst crises. Introduction

Abstract

This dossier springs from a meeting of the network «Health in the Interwar years» held in Granada in April 2007. This international network, which it is loosely organised around the electronic list of distribution maintained by the spiritful dedication of Iris Borowy, from Rostock University in Northern Germany, had a first presentation meeting in 2003, which produced a book on Facing Illness in Troubled Times. Health in Europe in the Interwar Years, 1918-1939 1. There we tried to grasp the actual health experiences beyond political shifts and organizational changes of the time, taking a view on the forming of health statistics that remained as main quantitative sources for the period. This allowed for a nuanced approach to the European past and contributed to the better understanding of the several case-studies (on Yugoslavia, Spain, Macedonia, Germany or Palestine, among others) presented. The book produced a nitid view of health as becoming a firstclass political problem in the interwar years, full of questionings, rich in promises and burgeoning professional administrations, a space worth of further analysis. At a next informal gathering in Paris, at the occasion of the 2005 Conference of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health, we decided that time was ripe for a second scientific meeting dealing with «Crises as opportunities for health?». We aimed to discuss aspects and initiatives of future developments that revealed themselves through the diverse critical situations lived during the interwar years in Europe, and their interconnecting links, by means of a plurality of singular, nation —or institution— centred studies. A selection of papers presented at the Granada meeting have been collected here, including a further one prepared independently that has been added because of its closeness to our subject. Thus, we present papers on Britain, Norway, Greece and Spain (two), as well as one on a Jewish organization in Russia and/or Poland and a further one on the activities of the main institutional international actor in public health of the time, the League of Nations Health Organisation.