Medicine and Social Science in Maternal Child Health Policies: Chile, 1952–73

From the creation of the National Health Service in 1952 to the military coup of 1973, Chile’s Maternal-Child Health policies – aimed primarily at accelerating the decline in the mortality rates of mothers and infants – went through a series of transformations linked to the shift in Chilean medicine from a clinical to a health orientation in this period.  In particular, the experience and knowledge accumulated by the University of Chile’s School of Health (created in 1943), thanks to its early and solid association with the Panamerican Health Organization, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the World Health Organization, reveal the international linkages that contributed to the transformation of medical practice and training of health professionals in Chile during the 1950s.  At the same time, another critical factor was the inclusion of the “social sciences” (such as anthropology, sociology, and psychology) in medical practice and investigation; these approaches allowed doctors to understand health and sickness not only as clinical, objective phenomena, but rather as conditions linked to their patients’ socioeconomic and cultural situation.

This paper focuses on the significance of the incorporation of social sciences into the debates led by doctors and social workers about Maternal-Child Health policies in this period.  It also explore the intellectual origins and subjects that characterized the applied social sciences, as well as the role they played in policies designed to protect the health of mothers and children, particularly those aimed at prevention of abortion and pregnancy among unmarried women.

 Preliminary research indicates that the incorporation of the social sciences “humanized” medical attention provided to mothers, which both enhanced women’s trust and involvment and increased practitioners’  understanding of the popular medicine their patients often used, thereby contributing to changes in the historically negative perceptions held by some health professionals about mothers’ habits and behaviors.