A multilayered analytical study that situates the Pan American Health Organization in a complex and shifting historical context and examines the internal dynamics of the organization in a probing critical fashion.

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 requirementfor 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 inLima, Peru, and editor of Missionaries of Science: The Rockefeller Foundation and Latin America [Indiana University Press, 1994].