Hospitals as Centers of Revolutionary Action: The Mexican Medical Movement of 1965

In the mid-1960s Mexico City hospitals and clinics became contested spaces in a long-lasting struggle between the medical profession and the Mexican state. Physicians who joined the movement were harassed, followed, and a few hundred lost their medical license. What began as a labor dispute with the state quickly morphed instead into a movement that questioned the legitimacy of an increasingly authoritarian state. This paper examines the role of young doctors as they tried to redefine their labor and their place of work as a space where not only doctors but patients had the obligation to demand more from the government. In so doing, the language of health and science and the very practice of medicine became part of the revolutionary discourse.