Public health, social assistance and the consolidation of the Mexican state: 1888-1940
Description
In the middle of the nineteenth century as an outgrowth of the Reform the Mexican state took responsibility from the Church for the care of the sick poor. The chronically unstable Mexican government adopted a theory of state administration that had been popular in Europe for most of the preceding century. Called 'the science of police,' this theory gave the government a mandate to protect the populace and put in government hands the responsibility for maintaining public health and welfare The Revolution did not, as has been assumed by some investigators, comprise the critical watershed between a state unconcerned with health and one clearly bent toward active interventionism. The Revolution confirmed the changes brought by the Porfirian state and, following the adoption of the Constitution of 1917, increased the scale of the government's health and welfare programs Political activity in the 1920s solidified the state and ended the cycle of regional rebellions. Health programs grew markedly as one of the means by which the state could reward its largely poor and rural constituency. The state also quite self-consciously increased its role in health in order to develop a stable and healthy labor force, prerequisites for Mexico to achieve modernization This dissertation breaks new ground in showing the central influence played by the Rockefeller Foundation International Health Board in all phases of the creation and expansion of the Mexican health bureaucracy. The Foundation designed, and financed the most significant and beneficial federal health programs from 1918 to 1940. The Foundation provided a significant percentage of the Health Department's budget. In the late twenties and thirties it trained the majority of the Health Department's field personnel. It developed and tested prototypes of new and innovative health promotions; and it paid comfortable fellowships to Health Department officials to travel and/or study in the United States The involvement of the Rockefeller Foundation reached its peak during the Presidency of Lazaro Cardenas when despite his administration's official anti-yankee attitude the Cardenas regime greatly expanded the close relationship established previously