Doctors, Agents, and Agency: How Hospital Reports Helped End a Strike

In early 1964 a series of reports on the state of Mexican public health institutions made there way into the Department of Federal Security. With a roster of empty hospital beds, missing gauze, and bad cafeteria food, they seem oddly out of place. But it is the first and last paragraphs of these otherwise mundane reports which make them quite compelling. These reports reveal a growing political anxiety over the surging discontent of Mexico City's residents, interns and titled physicians. Using three of these reports I will show how one can trace the evolution and growing importance of what was to become a full-blown doctors' movement for political change. Ultimately, what these documents reveal is how the Mexican government was grappling with middle class discontent.