# The Constitution of the World Health Organization enters into force Date: 1948 ## The fact On 7 April 1948 the Constitution of the World Health Organization entered into force after the required ratifications. The preamble defines health as complete physical, mental and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease. The instrument creates a specialised agency. It does not staff clinics by itself and does not quote [Hippocrates](/people/hippocrates) as a legal source. ## Context The constitution was adopted at the International Health Conference in New York in 1946. Its health definition is broader than humoral balance or germ absence. Later WHO emergency powers, the International Health Regulations, and pandemic agreements are separate instruments. Hippocratic rhetoric appears in speeches, not in the operative articles. Hippocrates of Cos is not the sole author of every Greek medical treatise later copied under his name, and he is not the signer of every later oath or code that quoted him. Shared work with unnamed Coan practitioners, Alexandrian compilers, Galen, Latin printers, medical faculties, and twentieth-century medical associations does not erase the Cos identity Plato used, and it does not make a fifth-century physician the author of the 1948 Declaration of Geneva. ## Evidence and sources WHO publishes the constitution. The UN Charter independently frames specialised agencies. Neither document makes Cos a party. Official or archival record: Constitution of the World Health Organization (https://www.who.int/about/governance/constitution; World Health Organization). ## Significance Initiating institutional-capacity path. Complex contribution with low personal authorship. Medium confidence on welfare lag. A constitution can be cited to expand or to stall action. Later Facts record IHRs, emergencies, and withdrawals. A printed corpus does not vaccinate a child. An oath does not staff a clinic. ## What is established and what is not Established: WHO’s constitution entered into force on 7 April 1948. Not established: that Hippocrates defined health as WHO does, or that 1948 ratification changed a specific national mortality series that year. What would change the picture: a contradictory autograph, a securely dated Coan inscription naming a different author, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions acting in his name. The documentary trail can name an office, printer, code, trial, or treatise heading; it cannot name a complete Coan patient register. Confidence belongs on the impact path. Estimates of later harm from humoral treatment, where historians publish them, are attributed to those historians, not invented here. A Cos vita, a medieval oath manuscript, a Venetian folio, and a twentieth-century medical-association code are different instruments even when they share a heading. Hippocrates’ contribution, where it exists, is the name and the later use of treatises grouped under that name, not a modern ministry signature. Sharing labour with printers, editors, prosecutors, or assemblies is not a reason to drop the row and not a reason to treat the row as a clinical trial. Readers who want a birth certificate, a patient register, or a unique coefficient onto a modern indicator will not find those things in this instrument, and the page should not pretend otherwise. The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit to Cos in the fifth century BCE. If a number of deaths, doses, or pupils is not in the official or independent record named above, it is not supplied here. ## People - Hippocrates: https://factrail.ai/people/hippocrates ## Drivers - Health-System Capacity: https://factrail.ai/drivers/health-system-capacity ## Sources - https://www.who.int/about/governance/constitution - https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text ## Methodology https://factrail.ai/methodology Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/who-constitution-1948