ABSTRACT
Over the half century from 1948 to 1998, theWorld Health Organization (WHO) slipped from a commanding position as the unquestioned leader of international health to a muchdiminished role in the crowded and contested world of global health. WHO began at a time of high idealism and heightened internationalist expectations, when visionary leaders saw the new organisation as the best hope for both health and peace in the post-war world (Fosdick 1944). That vision was glimpsed again at Alma-Ata in 1978, yet despite the dreams of many of its founders and early supporters, WHO was marked from its early days by political and diplomatic entanglements and budgetary constraints that, over five decades, compromised the organisation and restricted its operating capacity. Indeed, those entanglements and constraints eventually pushed WHO in the 1990s to try to reinvent itself as a coordinator of global health in a world with many new and powerful players.
