Medical Doctors under Military Dictatorship in Chile: Social Medicine Praxis, Survival Strategies, and Resistance

• In Event: The Politics of Health, Science and Gender in late 20th and 21st Century Chile

Abstract

This study seeks to illustrate that the 1973 military coup in Chile dismantled a functioning public health system, but that it could not eradicate the social medicine praxis practices that doctors adopted in previous decades. It starts with a brief analysis of the roots of social medicine praxis in the 1930s and 40s, examples of community health services, and doctors’ support of social and socialized medicine that led to the foundation of the National Health Service in 1952. In the main part of this presentation, I discuss the dictatorship’s attack of both medical doctors and the public health system. While military leaders linked both social and socialized medicine to the leftist political system they sought to destroy, their destruction of old institutions could not prevent the independent, often clandestine initiatives by medical doctors whose innovative strategies created a continuity in health care practices in spite of the threat of military violence. Physicians and health care workers treated people in a community health programs, such as the Centro Integral de Salud (CIS), and the community health initiative in San Luís de Huechuraba. These projects give insights into doctors’ initiatives that offered both medical care and survival strategies under state terrorism.

Author

• Jadwiga E Pieper Mooney, University of Arizona