The Value of Health : A History of the Pan American Health Organization

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).