Health is an essential sacred metaphor inseparable from modernity and its legacy – even the author of the most well-known contemporary theory of civil religion, Robert N. Bellah, uses the concept of “the health of a civil religion as a prime indication of the overall health of any society.” The prerequisites for transforming health care into a civil religion were established in the mid-tolate nineteenth century and the prewar period, when the ideologues of social hygiene, the first generation of eugenicists and anthropologists, legitimized their activities in terms of improving the health of nations – in the name of their future. For instance, Charles Benedict Davenport and Francis Galton, two of the most recognized eugenicists, defined eugenics as a sort of religion that should unite people around health as an undisputable priority of public life. By being a science and a social movement simultaneously, eugenics and its derivatives, social hygiene and physical anthropology, could be seen as sets of beliefs, symbols and rituals that connected nations to particular principles of health care. Commonly associated with the oppressive policies of interwar regimes, eugenics provided the grounds for reestablishing routine practices of social hygiene as significant to the health of nations and their future. In combination with epidemic crises, eugenic concerns about the quality of future generations penetrated deeply into the ethical and moral grounds for building the nation.

During the interwar period, the concept of health, along with its sacred meaning, was refined and disseminated due to mutual efforts from both international and national stakeholders to “win the war against disease.” By being an entirely private and personal value, health perfectly fit with the Rousseauian approach to solve the dilemma of intolerance vs. the unity of the state – the latter being the core of success in building the nation. According to Rousseau, civil religion should be guided by a morality in which interiorization would be able to restrain the controversial relationship between private and public concerns in favor of national unity.