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96 Public health is a subject about which one country can learn from another. —Amartya Sen, “Passage to China” The Community Today, Tomorrow the World Chapter 5 There’s no place on earth like the world. —Brendan Behan, The Hostage In the 1990s the United States, like the rest of the industrialized world, was going global, and cultural diversity was becoming the norm. The new global perspective was finding its way into health care and medicine: The AIDS pandemic does not stop at the border; people carrying contagious diseases can be in a country thousands of miles away in ten hours. The potential of telemedicine for transmitting medical information via computer networks was emerging . There was a new spirit of cooperation among scientists and clinicians worldwide. And there was already a group, Médecins sans frontières, or Doctors without Borders, dedicated to going to the poorest and most remote regions of the world to aid the sick and suffering.1 In the early 1990s, universal rights to health and well-being were getting revived attention at home, especially since the United States was, and still is, the only industrialized country in the world without universal health care. This sudden interest in international health added a new dimension to my focus on active participation in health care reform. Besides the obvious medical implication, such reforms now had a powerful political and social aspect not only on a local and national level, but internationally as well. I was also becoming more personally involved in international health. During a summer visit to Rush, Professor Jeffrey Levett, an old friend and a professor at the National School of Public Health in Athens, Greece, stirred my interest in the emerging challenges of a global perspective in health and illness. He persuaded me that globalization provided an opportunity to get health care professionals from many countries to cooperate on addressing health issues that affected all of us. Moreover, the focus on the economic outcomes of The Community Today, Tomorrow the World 97 globalization through such efforts as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) glossed over the horrific deprivation and political oppression of the poorer nations. He invited me to give a presentation on health manpower development in the United States at the second annual meeting of the Federation of International Cooperation of Health Services and Systems Research Centers (FICOSSER) in Delphi, Greece, in May 1996. On the basis of that presentation, I was invited to Belgrade, Serbia, by Dr. Momčilo Babič, director of Bezanijska kosa Medical Center, where I began working with a group of progressive physicians with a strong public health point of view. I eventually became a member of the European Center for Peace and Development, an agency of the United Nations. Under the auspices of that organization I participated in an international conference on public health and peace in Skopje, Macedonia, in December 2001. Professor Levett and I coined the phrase (which later became the theme of the conference) “The health of the public is a catalyst for peace and development.” The subject of international health was becoming a major part of my life, and I wanted to use my commitment to support students who had a desire to serve abroad. All the while students were helping refugees in Chicago they were also interested in helping vulnerable and disenfranchised people in the Third World. The seed was planted early when those who had gone abroad relayed their experiences to fellow students. Not only were these experiences exciting, they were enlightening as well. As one student put it, they opened your eyes to a totally different culture where health and illness take on a different meaning; the effect is so profound, it changes you for life. In my discussions with medical students who were seriously interested, we began devising a way for promoting student involvement in international health. The students decided to set up a new program, the Rush Students for International Health and Medicine (RSIHM), which was actually a logical spinoff from RCSIP. As with RSCIP, the aim was to have RSIHM become a full-scale program in its own right. The creation of such an organization was inevitable. Because of my own interest, I became more of a partner than an advisor. My responsibility was to develop a framework that could be used to validate the significance of involving students (even for a short time) in poor and developing countries as an adjunct to their education as...

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