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During the German occupation, Greece suffered a serious malaria epidemic, and the progress in malaria control achieved by the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) mission to Greece in the 1930s was wiped out. At the same time, however, medical relief was channelled into the country through a relaxation of the Allied blockade. While the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) inherited the wartime local relief distribution networks, malaria control measures required a return of the RF scientists within the organizational and logistical framework provided by UNRRA's Medical Division. They introduced dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) spraying on a nationwide scale, revolutionizing malaria control and the idea of disease eradication, and created UNRRA's largest DDT malaria programme. As the Greek civil war unfolded, the fight against malaria acquired a dynamic which immunized it from the political issues of the postwar international scene. In the Greek case, the RF's influence on malaria control by means of DDT moved smoothly from UNRRA to the World Health Organization (WHO) framework.

This volume is a collection of chapters that deal with issues of health, hygiene and eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945, specifically, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece and Romania. Its major concern is to examine the transfer of medical ideas to society via local, national and international agencies and to show in how far developments in public health, preventive medicine, social hygiene, welfare, gender relations and eugenics followed a regional pattern. This volume provides insights into a region that has to date been marginal to scholarship of the social history of medicine