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Article ID: CBB001211780

Seeing the Countryside through Medical Eyes: Social Service Reports in the Making of a Sickly Nation (2013)

Endeavour: Review of the Progress of Science
Volume: 37, no. 1
Issue: 1
Pages: 29-38
Publication date: 2013
Language: English

Publication Date: 2013
Edition Details: Part of a special issue, “Continuity and Change in the History of Mexican Public Health”

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Medicine Social medicine Rural history Poverty Medicine and society Public health Sanitation Indigenous peoples; indigeneity Mexico

This article explores sanitary reports sent by early generations of social service year medical students who wrote about their first encounters with rural diseases and the people who suffered them. By exploring what was reported we see how, instead of questioning the roots of rural illness, poverty, and the hunger that they witnessed, young doctors often unwittingly reinforced urban prejudices and concerns that blamed indigenous Mexicans for their own poverty and diseased status. Because sanitary reports were authored by medical students, they were often perceived as `scientific' evidence of the living conditions and unhealthy choices of rural Mexicans. The author argues that as in the case of travel narratives, medical students' written assessments influenced how the rest of society came to understand rural Mexico.

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Article Ramírez, Paul (2013) Enlightened Publics for Public Health: Assessing Disease in Colonial Mexico. Endeavour: Review of the Progress of Science (pp. 3-12). unapi

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