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“All Must Combine In The Struggle Against The Microbes” Global Biopolitics And Twentieth-Century Health Organizations, Patrick Kothe

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

The following paper explores the rise of global biopolitics by focusing on the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) as pivot points around which an international system transitioned into a global system. The central thesis of the paper is that the LNHO served as the first true site of deployment for global discourses on health and hygiene, not as recent scholarship has suggested, the WHO. The purpose of the paper, however, is to provide an overview of the larger transformation of public health in the twentieth century, beginning with the proliferation of nineteenth-­‐century international …