Health policies and rural population in Córdoba´s pampa (1930-1950)?

ORTIZ BERGIA MARÍA JOSÉ

Belfast

Conferencia; European Social Science History Conference; 2018

International Institute of Social History - Queen´s University

From the beginning of the twentieth century, the provincial state built health policies with the goal to deal with problems such as tisis, syphilis and infant mortality in the main urban centers of the territory. Historians have demonstrated that the purpose and location of these devices were closely linked to concerns about the adverse consequences of the ?social question? and the urbanization of the period. During the thirties, however, a different phenomenon began to emerge. The provincial administration inaugurated a series of generalist health care centers that after a brief period became some dozens. The main novelty of these devices was that most of them were located in small towns and rural areas of the province. In the long term, those health centers became a central part of a larger process of public health policies construction over rural welfare. However, a closer look at the phenomenon projects a rather distant image of a statization of rural health services. Instead, in the small towns of Córdoba´s pampa, doctors, politicians, civil and religious associations were actively involved in the process of building of new states interventions. Buildings, furniture, medical practices and medicines tended to fall on local budgets and the inhabitants were strong cooperators of the official health centers. From our perspective, this meant that the comprehension of this historical process of building of rural health policies requires to understand how those communities shaped the representations and experiences of public health and state agencies in Córdoba´s pampa. The purpose of this paper is to describe the interaction between the new sanitary devices and the local population of Córdoba´s pampa between the thirties and the fifties. For this, we plan to analyze the characteristics of the services and the agents who were involved in the process. Likewise, we are interested in their development over time and the factors that conditioned it. Finally, we intend to examine the relationship between officer´s goal of centralization and the expectations of the population. To answer these questions we will use documentation produced by the provincial agencies and the inhabitants of Córdoba´s pampa.