Active Public Health & Healthcare Society, Politics & Law

Developing Humanitarian Medicine: from Alma Ata to Bio-Tech, a history of norms, knowledge production and care (1978-2020)

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation University of Manchester
Funding £1.5M
Period Sept 2023 — Sept 2028

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A single 1978 declaration on primary healthcare—the Alma Ata Declaration—set in motion a global struggle to define what humanitarian medicine is, who controls it, and how it should operate, yet no one has systematically traced how that struggle unfolded over the past four decades. This project addresses a gap in historical understanding. While humanitarian medicine now deploys advanced biotechnologies, runs campaigns for drug access, and debates whether healthcare is a human right, its own norms and boundaries have never been systematically documented. The researchers will examine how NGOs, states, and international bodies have shaped humanitarian medicine since 1978—how they defined its remit, regulated its actions, and negotiated with pharmaceutical and biotech industries. They will also investigate how states have tried to harness or control these medical interventions. If successful, this work will provide a historical framework that humanitarian practitioners can use to navigate current dilemmas—particularly around partnerships with drug and diagnostics companies. It could inform how emergency medical teams operate, how clinical norms are set in crisis settings, and how future humanitarian interventions balance patient care with experimental initiatives. The project is fundamentally historical and analytical, not prescriptive, but its findings could reshape institutional policies that quietly govern medical responses to disasters and conflicts worldwide.

View original technical description
This project on the history of humanitarian medicine as a set of emergency interventions, seeks to generate significant shifts in understanding its scientific and organisational specificity and role in developing clinical norms, debating ‘rights-based’ approach to health access and leading campaigns for access to drugs while deploying bespoke biotechnological tools. This research project will investigate questions that have direct relevance to the future of medical humanitarianism: - How have humanitarian initiatives, non- governmental organisations (NGOs), international and national actors developed humanitarian medicine since the declaration of Alma Ata (1978) on primary healthcare? - How have they defined humanitarian medicine and its remit? - How have they established normative processes regulating their action and the reach of humanitarian medicine? - How have humanitarian medical providers engaged with pharmaceutical and biotech industries? - And finally, how have states sought to harness and control humanitarian medicine? This history will inform humanitarian practice and contribute to ongoing debates on how humanitarian medical providers engage with pharmaceutical and biotech industries to disseminate, repurpose, and research drugs and diagnostic tools. The project will develop four workpackages building up from patient-centred clinical norms and concerns on care to experimental initiatives in humanitarian setting and state-led norm-setting diplomacy through emergency medical teams (EMTs) initiatives.

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Researchers

Bertrand Taithe (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Non-state humanitarianism: From Colonialism to Human Rights
Colonial and Transnational Intimacies: Medical Humanitarianism in the French external Resistance, 1940-1945.
Towards a humanitarian research ethics.
The Local Bases of Global Health: Historical and contemporary perspectives on primary healthcare in South Asia
Advances in Research on Globally Accessible Medicine (AROGYAM)

Original classification

Discovery Award

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.