“Los Graves Flagelos de la Raza”: Rural Health Commissions and Sanitary Units in 1930s Colombia

The history of public health in early twentieth-century Colombia highlights changes between the period of Conservative hegemony (1900-1930) and the establishment of Liberal party rule (1930-1946). For politicians, bureaucrats, and medical doctors, concerns over national health justified instituting state-sponsored initiatives. For Conservatives and Liberals, an official rhetoric defined around the opposing poles of health and disease became a key aspect of their modernizing agenda. As these officials tied ideas of health to boundaries of membership within the social body, they reinforced hierarchies based on class, gender, race, and regional differentiation. These distinctions helped them define who could be included as modern citizen within the nation.

This paper considers a particular government-sponsored program instituted by the Liberal state during the 1930s: the establishment of sanitary units and Comisiones rurales. In order to fully understand this program’s agenda, I will examine Salud y Sanidad, a periodical sponsored by National Department of Health’s rural health division, in addition to regional board directors’ annual reports. The transition from Conservative to Liberal governance shifted the focus and organization of public health campaigns from the nation’s urban centers to its rural areas. As in other Latin American countries, rural areas were disproportionately indigenous or Afro-Colombian. Thus, rural commissions implicitly associated disease with place, and place with race. As the Liberal health establishment redirected its gaze towards the countryside, policymakers drew upon cultural stereotypes about rural dwellers, which reproduced racialized, gendered, and regional hierarchies.