Of Pragmatists and Politicos: Demographic Data in the Making of Chilean Social Medicine in the Early Cold War

• In Event: Public health, population, and contested development politics in Cold War Latin America

Abstract

In his treatise on the birth of social medicine, Michel Foucault argues that "modern medicine is a social medicine whose basis is a certain technology of the social body; medicine is a social practice, and only one of its aspects is individualistic and valorizes the relations between the doctor and the patient." (Foucault 1974 [2001], 136). This study explores the political dimensions of social medicine practice that extend from doctor-patient relationships to nation-state politics to international institutional networks in the early Cold War. In 1957, the Chilean government signed an agreement on the establishment of a Latin American Centre for Demography (CELADE) with the United Nations and formalized the new attention to demographic data and population studies in public policy formation, including public health. Institutions like CELADE in Santiago, as well as individual medical doctors and health officials, employed statistics for specific projects of preventive and community medicine. I connect some of the institutional and individual initiatives that focused on population control and public health and document how medical doctors negotiated pragmatic as well as the political dimensions of public health planning. Their initiatives uncover some of the complexities of social medicine as both a medical doctrine and a political movement.

Author

• Jadwiga E Pieper Mooney, University of Arizona