Dr. Carl E. Taylor, an architect of a 134-nation agreement that established primary health care as a universal right, died on Feb. 4 in Baltimore. He was 93.

The cause was prostate cancer, said the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he was a professor emeritus and faculty member for 48 years.

Dr. Taylor conducted research in more than 70 countries and helped establish international health as a distinct academic field in the United States. His field trials in India 50 years ago were among the first to demonstrate the value of recruiting and training villagers to deliver basic health care in poor communities.

With two others, he wrote a pivotal 1959 study connecting malnutrition and infectious disease.

He was the primary consultant to the World Health Organization on the international Alma-Ata Declaration, adopted at a 1978 conference in Alma-Ata, now Altmaty, Kazakhstan. The document’s advocacy of community participation in health care, a position influenced in part by Dr. Taylor’s research, remains a guiding tenet of public health.