Missionaries, Medicine, and Popular Education

Catholic missionaries who settled in Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century contributed to broad transformations in approaches to popular education.  Paulo Freire’s Pedegogy of the Oppressed with its effort to engage people in dialogue to promote literacy and mutual education appears at the core of these efforts.  Yet, popular education extended beyond basic literacy.  One of the sites where its influence was most profound was in education of medical practitioners, where exchange of knowledge became the foundation for radical social and political critiques of local and global political and economic power.  This paper provides a preliminary effort to examine the emergence of popular medical education networks in Latin America and their transnational influence.  It focuses on the region from Mexico to Panama examining the influence of better-known individuals like Ivan Illich and David Werner and lesser-known social actors including women religious, health promoters, and midwives.  It analyzes distinct modes of education including local training centers and radio schools and formal publications intended for academic and medical audiences.