Science, Professional Training, and Public Health: The Sanitation of the Medical Profession in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920–34

In 1937, Dr. Alfonso Pruneda pointed out that the dislocation between “the university and the masses” hindered the effective use of science as a tool of national progress. His view reflected the difficulties that he faced as an officer of the Department of Public Health in the 1920s. During this decade, sanitary authorities enforced legislation and implemented other measures to cope with the liberal practice of medicine, which some physicians considered “the fifth plague”. Using the UNAM’s medical school as a model, they not only required that practitioners possessed a medical degree, but evaluated the extent to which medical schools that issued them fit this model. Facing little possibility to unify the profession through a uniform medical curriculum all over the nation, university physicians used their position in the new Departamento de Salubridad Pública to marginalize the practice of doctors graduated from proprietary medical schools. While resistance resulted in the Department granting licenses to some of these doctors, the regulation of medical training eventually passed to the Secretaría de Educación Pública, ending with the sanitation of the medical profession.