The Spirit of Global Health

Front matter

OXFORD

The World Health Organization and the ‘Spiritual Dimension’ of Health, 1946-2021

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Preface

At the hour of its birth, it was clear that the WHO was intended to carry out a mandate far broader than the often technical and bureaucratic minutiae evident in its daily operations today. As a specialized agency of the UN, the WHO was tasked in the aftermath of the Second World War with promoting the well-being of humanity in order to avert the spread of social malaise, feared to foment another world war. Adopted in the same year as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, its constitution declared that health was a safeguard of peace and recognized ‘unequal development as a problem for all. It declared health a human right and gave governments the ‘responsibility for the health of their peoples’. The WHO thus put forth a new social contract which saw in health the precondition for human beings to live fulfilling lives in peace and harmony.’ The subject of this book is closely linked to this founding idea. While historians of medicine and political scientists have used archival sources to write the institutional history of the WHO, the present volume is the first to reconstruct how the WHO grappled with the legacy of its constitution, and how the ‘spiritual dimension’ of health emerged as the key term through which humanistic and moral considerations were raised, contested, and institutionalized.

Like any book, this one is the outcome of a process that in retrospect seems clearer than it was during its individual phases. It began with our curiosity about the fact that the historical origins of the emerging professional field of Spiritual Care had so far received so little attention. This applies in particular to the role of the WHO in this development. We found previous research to be highly fragmented and limited to individual aspects of a specific context or to individual actors. The standard narrative attributes the development somewhat simplistically to Cicely Saunders and the modern hospice movement, which allegedly brought the topic to the attention of the WHO. We wanted to review this narrative and, if necessary, correct or enrich it. Our inquiry was stimulated by the discovery of the 1984 resolution on the ‘spiritual dimension’ of health and its lack of reception both within and outside the WHO. This raised the question of how this resolution was created, who the actors were, and why it has been referred to so rarely.

By investigating this often-forgotten dimension of health, which so far has seldom been the subject of historical research and conceptualization, this study aims to make a contribution to the history of medicine and health-related

? Adam Gaffney, To Heal Humankind: The Right to Health in History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 213.

X PREFACE spirituality in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In this process, we have reconstructed and evaluated a development within the WHO which is far from concluded. In the final stage of our research project, with most of our work completed, the Covid-19 pandemic began. In this context, the WHO's engagement with the ‘spiritual dimension’ of health took another leap, which one day, with the benefit of historical hindsight, may well be recognized as a significant milestone. We will turn to this latest episode in the epilogue of this book.

It is a hermeneutic truism that knowledge always flows from a specific perspective. A ‘view from nowhere’ is not possible in historical research. This also applies to the present book, which was written at the Chair for Spiritual Care, created at the University of Zurich in 2015. This shapes our approach, for our study is a contribution to an interdisciplinary field that is still in its infancy. For this reason, the present work is a historical reconstruction of the emergence of a new concept within an international organization: the ‘spiritual dimension’. Though we take a historical approach, we above all hope that this book will contribute to the development of Spiritual Care by clarifying the concept it explores.

Simon Peng-Keller, Fabian Winiger, Raphael Rauch Zurich, 5 May 2022