‘A Sick, Weak, and Ignorant People’: Public Health Education and Prevention in Rural Colombia, 1930–1940

Abstract

This article analyses Salud y Sanidad (Health and Sanitation), a government journal edited in 1930s Colombia. It examines the state's model of public health, which proposed education and prevention as strategies to guarantee the success of its programmes. It argues that despite the journal's more progressive approaches, editors and contributors reproduced stereotypes about Colombia's rural inhabitants that contradicted state rhetoric and showed the limits of public health models that do not address the underlying social inequities that drive the propagation of poverty and disease in rural areas, and that ultimately continued to blame victims for their illness and misfortune

The Colombian Healthy Child Contest: in search of Latin America’s “ideal child” in the 1930s

“…9 This initiative would catalyze interest in protecting and caring for children, especially in the countryside. The government drive to implement the contest in the countryside was part of its ambition to “sanitize and educate” the rural population in a country that was mostly agrarian in the 1930s, with a lack of proper sanitary facilities and hygienic habits that was seen as an obstacle to modernization ( Muñoz Rojas, 2022 , p.92; on health programs planned by Liberal governments in rural areas, see Jalil, 2019 ; Botero-Tovar, 2021 ). It also would consolidate the idea of a “health” regulation established by the sanitary authority.…”

Peticiones de residentes y mujeres públicas en torno a la zona sexual de Cali, 1930-1940

“…12 De manera similar a otras ciudades colombianas, la higiene y el saneamiento se convirtieron en una preocupación central entre las élites Caleñas. 13 La idea de que los programas de higiene y saneamiento redundarían en la mejora del elemento humano, tanto para la ciudad como para la nación, fue ampliamente mencionada en los debates de la época (Jalil 2015;Muñoz 2022). Los funcionarios de salud y saneamiento de Cali elaboraron sobre la necesidad de redimir y defender a la población obrera y pobre de la ciudad, señalando en un informe que "la higiene como la nueva ciencia experimental con resultados prácticos... debe prevenir las enfermedades y tener como objetivo principal la defensa del capital humano".…”

A school without railings: rural backgrounds, social medicine, and the circulation of public health material in Colombia, 1930-1946

“…Beyond a limited appreciation of the ways of life in the country's underdeveloped regions, the Colombian rural campaigns show the contradiction between politicians' fascination with regional differences and their difficulty in coordinating with regional political power (Robledo, 1946;Muñoz, 2009;Jalil, 2019). In most countries, the context of social medicine in the international health activities of the 1930s was comprised of different approaches to tackle the social and economic factors affecting diseases, while largely overlooking local dynamics (Packard, 2016).…”