Histories of Health, Rights, and Nation in Chile and Bolivia: Resolving “Emergencies” and Negotiating Exclusion and Inclusion in Twentieth Century Nations

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Who and what causes health crises in modernizing nations, and what are some of the scientific models that may help resolve such crises? What is the proper path towards developing a healthy and modern nation, and who has the power to define such path? How can we best understand the links between global scientific debates – or global paradigm changes on women’s rights or the right to health - and nation-state policies? And how do discourses on health and rights shape policy changes and people’s lives? We are exploring these and other questions by examining multiple discourses and political propositions made by social reformers, doctors, scientists, and activists with different, often competing understandings of health and rights. As we trace the constructions of “model” citizens in Bolivia and Chile, we find that modernizing elites often insist on the maintenance of race- and gender based hierarchies just as they appear to defend citizens’ rights to health.

Sub Track

• Health and Society

Session Organizer

• Jadwiga E Pieper Mooney, University of Arizona

Chair

• Kathryn N Gallien, University of Arizona

Individual Presentations

• Answering the Social Question: Chilean Eugenics and Nation Building - Sarah Walsh, University of Sydney

• Eugenesia y Educación en Chile: “cuidar el cuerpo de niños y jóvenes”. Las colonias, la educación física y el servicio médico escolar (1920-1940). - Maria Josefina Cabrera

• Raising Children, Raising the Race: Intersections of puericulture and eugenics in Bolivian medicine, 1910s-1950s - Kathryn N Gallien, University of Arizona

• The Global Sixties in Chile: Health, Sexuality, and Rights - Jadwiga E Pieper Mooney, University of Arizona

• Milk Makes the State and the State Makes Citizens: The Extension of Chile´s State Milk Programs 1954-1973 - Jael A Goldsmith Weil, Universidad de Los Lagos Chile

Discussant

• Mary Rose R Kubal, St. Bonaventure University