The Coalition Between Medical Doctors and the Military: On the Establishment of Public Health in Chile, 1870–1939

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter focuses on the interdependency between military rivalries and the exchange of ideas across national borders, while the complex causal mechanism at play relates to the “able man mechanism” (Obinger et al., Introduction: Studying the Warfare-Welfare Nexus. In Warfare and Welfare: Military Conflict and Welfare State Development in Western Countries, ed. Herbert Obinger, Klaus Petersen, and Peter Starke, 1–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). At the centre is the strategic coalition between Chilean military and the medical profession and its effects on the field of public health. Both, the military and the medical profession, had realised that poor health of soldiers jeopardised military success and weakened national defence as well as national productivity. This insight, however, was the result of the rise of medicine as a discipline that led to a re-interpretation of health as a resource of the state and established state responsibility for the health of national citizens.