Ciclo sobre Estudios Sociales de la Alimentación y la Salud

SEMINARIO

‘Latin American Social Medicine, Across the Waves’
Eric D. Carter (Macalester College)

Ciclo conducido por el Dr. Stefan Pohl (iHC-UAB)

24/01/24, 16:00h
Pueden escribir a stefan.pohl@uab.cat para pedir previamente el texto en pdf.

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This presentation analyzes the ideological roots of social medicine in Latin America, its diffusion through institutional and interpersonal networks, and how ideas in social medicine translated into social policy. In the process, I develop the outline of a new narrative of Latin American social medicine, as a movement with two distinct waves, bridged by a mid-century hiatus dominated by Cold War developmentalism. First-wave social medicine – whose protagonists included figures such as Salvador Allende (and other members of the Vanguardia Médica) of Chile and Ramón Carrillo in Argentina – had its roots in the scientific hygiene movement, gained strength in the interwar period, and left its imprint on Latin American welfare states by the 1940s. Second-wave social medicine, marked by more explicitly Marxist analytical frameworks, took shape in the early 1970s amidst authoritarian pressures and crystallized institutionally in ALAMES (regionally) and ABRASCO (in Brazil). A dialectical process links these two waves into a single story: early social medicine demands, once institutionalized in welfare states and the international health-and-development apparatus, led to ineffective bureaucratic routines, which in turn sparked critical reflection, agitation for change, and a new wave of social medicine activism

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Eric D. Carter is Edens Professor of Geography and Global Health at Macalester College. He is a medical geographer who focuses on the social and environmental history of health and disease, and the politics of public health, especially in the Latin American context. His last book is In Pursuit of Health Equity: A History of Latin American Social Medicine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023).