The Spirit of Global Health

Since the beginning of the World Health Organization, many of its staff members, regional offices, member states, and directors-general have grappled with the question of what a spiritual dimension of health looks like, and how it might enrich the health policies advocated by their organisations. Contrary to the wide-spread perception that spirituality is primarily related to palliative care and has emerged relatively recently within the organisation, this study shows that itshistory is considerably longer and more complex, and has been closely connected to the WHOs ethical aspirations, its quest for more holistic and equitable healthcare, and its struggle with the colonial legacy of international health organisations. While such ideals and struggles silently motivatedmany of the key actors and policies - such as the provision of universal primary healthcare - which for decades have embodied the organisations loftiest aspirations, the WHOs official relationship with spirituality advanced in fits, leaps, and setbacks. At times creative and interdisciplinary, at others deeply political, this process was marked by cycles of institutional forgetting and remembering. Rather than as a triumph of religious lobbyists, this book argues, the spiritual dimensionof health may be better understood as a ghost that has haunted - and continues to haunt - the WHO as it comes to terms with its mandate of advancing health as a state of complete well-being available to all.