The dawn of the Chilean Health Society from 1948 to 1957

Abstract

The first decade of life of the Chilean Health Society is recounted, between the years 1947 and 1957. Years marked by the post-war, the division of the world into blocks and the need to advance models that would give different responses to the needs of the society. humanity. In the field of health, the debate focused on the organization of comprehensive systems, supported by the States and with the technical and political capacity to account for the epidemiological profiles that plagued the countries on the different continents. Chile, for its part, was experiencing a period of decline of the radical governments, which had advanced in the development of the middle classes, with a strong presence of the state in industrial production and civil works, while in health, two decades after the first social laws and the Ministry of Hygiene, Assistance and Social Welfare, an inability to achieve effective results in the medical-social reality of the country was evident.

This period is analyzed from the social and political point of view and the first years of the Society are located in it, identifying in the records of its beginnings, statutes, minutes of its days, documents of the time, the particularities of this institution within of others that also had their beginnings in the same decade.

It is concluded by proposing that the Society was a multiprofessional group, with a broad view of the determinants of health and that positioned itself in the space of civil society, as a technical-political organization, which aspired to be influential in the national debate on the reforms that the health system needed.