Transdisciplinary programme of comparative and transnational historical studies of medicine and public health in Latin America, from 1767 to the present day.

The main objective of this research programme is to carry out historical-comparative and transdisciplinary studies of medicine and public health in Latin America. These studies will focus both on the analysis of the transnational health sector reform agendas that have crossed the sub-continent, and on the particularities of the professionalisation processes linked to local conditions and determinations, within the framework of the construction of nation-states.
The Programme is framed within the research activities of the Social Studies of Sciences, Technologies and Professions Group of the Universidad del Rosario and arose from a previous comparative project on the history of medicine and public health in Latin America, carried out in two phases: an exploratory study, between 2012 and 2013; and a pilot study, comparing Colombia-Ecuador (1760-1950), between 2014 and 2016. Building on these previous experiences, this new Programme aims to address the comparison between medicine and public health in nine Latin American countries.
The period to be studied runs from the second half of the 18th century, starting with the Bourbon "modernisation project" in the colonies, to the present day. The aim is to understand and explain, from a historical-comparative and transnational perspective, the processes of professionalisation of modern and contemporary medicine and public health, including the way in which these have established two-way relationships with civil society and the state, for the construction and institutionalisation of medical activities, public health policies and health services and systems, always traversed by transnational agendas.
It also seeks to provide theoretical and methodological approaches to constitute a critical platform on which researchers, teachers and decision-makers in the participating countries can build a broader and deeper understanding of the ways in which health and professional development policies are conceived and reformulated. This will also enable them to analyse their own processes of medical and health professionalisation in relation to other countries and in the context of the asymmetrical relations between the metropolitan and peripheral scientific and medical communities. Such a platform would also allow us to think of mechanisms to build a global health from the bottom up and not one imposed from the metropolis.

A research programme that seeks to understand how and in what way medical and health professionals in the different Latin American countries have interacted with international health reform agendas in the different periods of their history from 1760 to the present day, in order to produce new knowledge on the subject in order to propose a global health policy from the bottom up, that is, from and for the countries of the so-called Third World, and not to have to accept global health models imposed from the metropolis.

Transnational studies; Transcontinental reform agendas; Health field; Health as a social field; Health professions; Health of the public; Health for the public; Regulation theory; Historical neo-institutionalism; Governmentality theory;

Due to the large scale of this programme and the high costs involved in its implementation as a whole, in agreement with the dean's office of the EMCS, it was decided to implement it in small sub-projects, in several successive stages, leaving the programme as a framework for the work, maintaining a common theoretical-methodological framework, objectives and periodisation for the different sub-projects. Thus, after the first exploratory phase, which gave rise to the Programme, and the initial pilot project comparing the case of the Bourbon health reforms in the Viceroyalty of New Granada and the Royal Court of Quito, which resulted in the multi-authored book "Similar but different", it was decided to continue with the component sub-projects of the Programme. Following the proposed periodisation, the study of the Bourbon Health Reforms in the second half of the 18th century and the first 30 years of the 19th century was continued. Thus, a first subproject was launched to compare the case of the New Kingdom of Granada with that of the Captaincy of Chile.
This gave rise to two articles: the first, Núñez-Gómez, María Camila, María Catalina Sánchez-Martínez and Emilio Quevedo V. (2021) "Viruela en Santiago, Concepción y Santafé: Comparación de las estrategias ilustradas (1782-1807), published in Revista Ciencias de la Salud 19(Número Especial): 1-22; the second, on the Bourbon medical-surgical educational reforms in Santafé and Santiago, which is in the process of peer review.
Once this first subproject was completed, we began a second subproject comparing the cases of the New Kingdom of Granada with those of the Viceroyalty of Peru and Colonial Brazil. The first result of this subproject is the recently published article: Quevedo V., Emilio, María Camila Núñez-Gómez, José Luis Ardila González, Oscar Daniel Hernández Quiñones and María Catalina Sánchez Martínez (2024) "Las reformas ilustradas de la educación médica en tres colonias americanas, siglo XVIII y XIX" published in the Bulletin of Spanish Studies: 1-51; but, there are 3 more works in the process of writing and evaluation.
Once this first subproject was completed, we began a second subproject comparing the cases of the New Kingdom of Granada with those of the Viceroyalty of Peru and Colonial Brazil. The first result of this subproject is the recently published article: Quevedo V., Emilio, María Camila Núñez-Gómez, José Luis Ardila González, Oscar Daniel Hernández Quiñones and María Catalina Sánchez Martínez (2024) "Las reformas ilustradas de la educación médica en tres colonias americanas, siglo XVIII y XIX" published in the Bulletin of Spanish Studies: 1-51; but, there are 3 more works in the process of writing and evaluation.
At the end of this second subproject, the group of researchers, taking into account the crisis of the neoliberal health models and systems in Latin America since the second decade of the 21st century, decided to leave the comparison of the Bourbon reforms in other countries, such as Mexico and Cuba, and to postpone the comparison of the Bourbon reforms of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, and to postpone also the comparison of the French-style reforms of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, and to skip the study of the influence of North American medicine and public health in Latin American countries during the second half of the 20th century and the first two and a half decades of the 21st century. Therefore, during the year 2023 and so far in 2024, all research activities under my responsibility (Selective In-depth Module, Master's Thesis and a good part of my own personal research) have been focused on characterising the Colombian case, as a starting point, and on reviewing the state of the art of existing knowledge on the other countries to be studied comparatively (Mexico, Cuba, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina and Brazil). This is the third subproject of this major programme, which will be described separately.