All books and papers mentioned appear in the bibliography.
INTRODUCTION
Paul Farmer, who features strongly in this book, is a health activist, anthropologist, and medical doctor. Pathologies of Power is a very impressive collection of his writings. His life story to date is told in Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains. Amartya Sen’s own contribution to development is laid out in Development as Freedom. The World Bank’s important World Development Report for 1993 is available from the World Bank website. For a detailed “state-of-the-art” survey concerning theory and practice in respect to the human right to health, see Andrew Clapham and Mary Robinson, eds., Realizing the Human Right to Health. A concise statement against the human right to health, entitled “Human Rights are the Wrong Basis for Health Care,” is set out by William Easterly and is available from the Financial Times website on free registration.
CHAPTER 1
All covenants and declarations mentioned are easily available on the Internet. Mary Ann Glendon’s The World Made New is very highly recommended. It is a beautifully written narrative of the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and associated events. Johannes Morsink’s The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is exceptionally impressive but much more for specialists. Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms can be viewed widely on the Internet.
CHAPTER 2
I’ve looked in more detail at the different possible moral justifications for global action on health in a paper, “Global Justice and Health: The Basis of the Global Health Duty.” Philosophers who have influenced the line taken in this book include Joseph Raz, in “Human Rights Without Foundations,” Henry Shue, in Basic Rights, and Charles Beitz, in The Idea of Human Rights. For an important more critical philosophical approach to human rights, see Onora O’Neill, “The Dark Side of Human Rights.”
CHAPTER 3
This chapter relies on the work of many scholars in health, human rights, and the history of medicine. Of those I have found most helpful, I would recommend in particular Peter Baldwin, Disease and Democracy, concerning the response to HIV/AIDS in the developed nations, and Paul Farmer, AIDS and Accusation, which focuses especially on Haiti. Unity Dow and Max Essex’s book Saturday is for Funerals is a very unusual account of Botswana, alternating the narratives of Unity Dow, a judge and writer, with the more technically oriented writings of Max Essex, a leading HIV scientist. L. O. Kallings’s “The First Postmodern Pandemic” is also very illuminating, as is Stephanie Nolen’s 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa. Jonathan Mann did perhaps more than anyone else to present HIV/AIDS in human rights terms; a good example of his writing is “Health and Human Rights.”
CHAPTER 4
To keep up with current debates the free online journal Health and Human Rights is an excellent resource. Joseph Stiglitz’s Globalization and its Discontents is a detailed critical discussion of the international financial institutions, and William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden is an excellent broader critique of international government aid and development work. Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid and Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion are essential reading on general development issues. On multi-drug-resistant TB and access to expensive medicines, see Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power, and in particular his discussion of Russian prisons. On the international recruitment of skilled workers, see Kapur and McHale, Give Us Your Brightest and Best. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics report, The Ethics of Research in Developing Countries is an excellent guide to the vexed questions of international research ethics. A good introduction to issues regarding maternal mortality is A. E. Yamin and D. P. Maine, “Maternal Mortality as a Human Rights Issue: Measuring Compliance with International Treaty Obligations,” and Amnesty International’s “Demand Dignity” campaign, accessible through their website, has a wealth of information.
CHAPTER 5
The issue of global health governance has been a concern of the People’s Health Movement. See, for example, Global Health Watch, Alternative Health Report, 2008. It was also discussed by the World Health Organization’s Commission on the Social Determinants of Health, especially by the Globalization and Health Knowledge Network, in its report Towards Health-Equitable Globalisation: Rights, Regulation and Redistribution.