Recent studies of institutions as varied as the League of Nations Health Committee, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Medical Missionary Society have drawn attention to the multiple roles played by international organisations since the nineteenth-century in the fields of healthcare and medicine. Most obviously they have played important parts in addressing particular health crises and emergencies, by providing medical expertise, drugs and medicines, and more general aid. Longer term impacts, however, have included the establishment of lasting healthcare infrastructures, the dissemination of new ideas about health and medicine, and the emergence of major bodies that transcend national political, economic and professional interests. However, from the refusal of the East India Company to sanction medical missionary activity in the eighteenth-century, to the recent ban on the WHO by al-Shabaab in Somalia, such international organisations have often faced opposition and hostility.

While there are a number of studies of particular institutions and movements, the IHO has rarely been viewed as a distinct phenomenon in the history of health and medicine in the modern period. This conference seeks to address this by bringing together historians and those from related disciplines with relevant research interests. It aims to examine fresh insights into particular periods, organisations and case studies, but also to explore the potential of comparative perspectives, and of teasing IHOs out of the wider history of health and medicine in modernity.

Key questions would include:

What agendas and ideologies shaped the emergence of IHOs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?
How far have IHOs met their objectives and what shaped or prevented success?
What impacts have IHOs had in the locales where they have been embedded?
To what extent have locals worked with or against IHOs and what shaped their approaches?
In what ways has the emergence of the IHO had wider impacts on international relations, and on domestic relations in contributing countries and cultures?
What does the emergence of the IHO over the last two centuries tell historians about the history of medicine, and of modernity?
Organisation and Arrangements

The organisers are keen to consider all relevant institutions, contexts and perspectives in order to stimulate an inclusive event. Proposals for panels and papers of no more than 300 words per paper are welcomed by April 30th 2013. Please submit by email to zhangyongan@shu.edu.cn and zhouqish@126.com.

Those accepted will be notified by May 16 2013. Participation will require the submission of papers of no more than 5000 words by September 30 2013. The intention is to publish a collected edition of papers from the event. The conference will take place in Baoshan Campus at Shanghai University, Shanghai and accommodation will be provided for all participants. Some funding for travel may be available to post-graduate students and early career scholars.