Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

394 Jean Bourgeois-Pichat
IX. SURVEY OF THE PRESENT SITUATION
126. To what extent do demographic researches in progress already foreshadow
the trends mentioned above? That is what we propose to discuss now. W e will
obviously not try to draw up a complete list of demographic researches in the
world today. That would be a formidable task. Ten years ago, it was undertaken
and brought to a successful conclusion by the Population Research and Train-
ing Center of Chicago University. A voluminous work consisting of nearly goo
pages was compiled by a team of thirty or so demographers belonging to a
number of countries. The first edition was published in 1959 and the last (4th)
in 1964. More recently, two French researchers were commissioned by the
Maison des sciences de l’homme to write a report on present trends in, and
organization of, demographic research for the period 1955-1965. This work was
published in 1966. It covers the researches undertaken during that period in the
form of bibliographical analyses.
Our purpose is quite different: we shall try to pick out the main centres of
interest that are gradually becoming apparent in demographic work.
Health questions
127. In the first place, we find a whole series of activities centred around health
questions. In these, the World Health Organization (WHO) is playing an impor-
tant pioneering part. Realizing that the living habits of a sick person may be of
more significance in the determination of his illness than is the specific agent
usually regarded as the causes of it, the General Assembly of WHO approved the
establishment within the organization of a special service to promote research
aimed at a rethinking of the very concept of ‘health‘. This service, ‘by using the
latest advances in modern technology and by constituting a multidisciplinary
group of sophisticated research scientists, including epidemiologists, ecologists,
sociologists, operational research :specialists, mathematicians, computer
technologists and others, [hopes] to develop a facility that will be able to predict
the probable developments in a given country in the coming years, which will
enable that country to institute such preventive measures as are possible before
the apparently unavoidable and undesirable side-effects of socio-economic
development and cultural change have had an unalterable effect.. .’.32
128. This international endeavour to introduce the human sciences into the
sphere of medical science has found an echo in a number of countries.
In the United States, a private foundation such as the Milbank Memorial
Fund, considering that in dealing with the problem of public health we are
nowadays faced with a ‘maze of social, cultural and economic considerations
which up to now were not the concern of public health authorities’, has decided
that it was its duty ‘to help to create clusters of trained and even inspired people
who will not apply slavishly the traditional solutions, but who will seek through
innovation and experiment for new ways through the maze.’33
Several of the annual conferences organized by the Milbank Memorial Fund
have been devoted to health problems in the modern world.