ABSTRACT
The famous preamble to the constitution of the WHO, which contains the definition of health as ‘complete physical, mental, and social well being and not simply the absence of disease or infirmity’, is often treated as if it were a singular statement at variance with the Western tradition. Certainly some of the men involved in promulgating it in 1948 saw it as something new, and indeed in important respects it was new. But there was much that was not new. The WHO definition of health is part of the very fabric of the Western tradition. It derives from deeply held assumptions about progress and perfectibility, and the role that science can and should play in the direction of human affairs. Whether the idea of progress is a creation of the seventeenth century, as J.B.Bury maintained, or derives from classical antiquity, as Robert Nisbet argues, there is no doubt that it is deeply embedded in Western thought and that, as Bury wrote, it was in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries ‘that the idea of intellectual progress was enlarged into the idea of the general Progress of man’.1 Its history thereafter has been traced by numerous authors and need not detain us. What is important for our argument is the way the WHO definition, embodying as it does deeply held Western assumptions about the nature of progress, is used in contemporary debates about the health of indigenous peoples in liberal democracies.
