Siemens and the Construction of Hospitals in Latin America, 1949–1964

Abstract

This article focuses on the construction of turnkey hospitals in Latin America by the German electromedical equipment maker Siemens-Reiniger-Werke (SRW) in the 1950s and 1960s. After World War II, SRW was unable to return to the overseas markets it had lost during the war through only the export of goods. Hospital construction was thus a way to reenter these markets, offering local governments a new form of service and product: a German hospital. In order to achieve this strategy, SRW organized and directed an informal association called Deutsche Hospitalia, which gathered together some thirty German manufacturers involved in the process of building a fully equipped hospital. This article argues that SRW, by diffusing a standardized hospital model in Latin America, contributed to the globalization of medicine.