@article{Médico-Social:3920,
      recid = {3920},
      author = {Server, Steven Blake},
      title = {A Test of Conscience: Navigating Mexico's Servicio  Médico-Social (1935-1940). Un examen de conciencia:  navegando el servicio médico-social de México (1935-1940)},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2022-06},
      pages = {362},
      abstract = {In 1936, the servicio médico-social (SMS) was established  by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and  the Departamento de Salubridad Pública (DSP) of President  Lázaro Cárdenas del Río (1934-1940).  The SMS was a public  health/medical education program that would require  sixth-year medical students at the UNAM to spend a period  of approximately six months doing medical service, basic  sanitary oversight, and record-taking in a rural Mexican  village, industrial site, or workcamp.  It was a low-cost,  low-footprint program that permitted Mexico to address  problems of health infrastructure in an efficient manner.   While scholars to date have seen the SMS as a reflection of  the powerful institutional expansion of the  post-Revolutionary Mexican State under President Cárdenas  in the domain of health, in this dissertation, I take an  alternative approach.  I argue that the SMS reflected not a  rigid clinico-politics resting upon the monolithic,  domineering power of the State, but rather, that the SMS  reflected a multifaceted, negotiated, open politics of  health that rested upon a foundation of emotion.  Drawing  upon the work of historian of emotions William Reddy, I  argue that the SMS was product of the navigation of  feeling, and inspired medical students to their own  navigation of feeling.  It cemented a détente between the  Cardenista State, impatient with Medicine’s cold and  disinterested emotional regime, and the profession of  Medicine, concerned with the preservation of its autonomy.   The program would “socialize” students, in the argot of the  time, catalyzing within them feelings of compassion for  vulnerable Mexican citizens, thus reorienting Medicine to  be more in line with the priorities of Cardenistas.   Students were not passive objects in this emotional  conflict.  They were key actors who determined the ultimate  form the politics of health took in Mexico’s localities.   It was by their performances of compassion, their  navigation of feeling—in receptional theses submitted to  the UNAM, and in clinical service described in them—that  students participated in Cardenista politics.  Compassion  served as a matrix within which students could transform  Cardenista ideals for Mexican nation—modernization,  national capitalism, eugenics, hygienization—into the  concrete political action of clinical care.  In this way,  this dissertation not only enhances our understanding of  the emotional dimensions of Cardenismo’s politics.  It also  shows that the practice of Medicine involves the careful  cultivation of feeling.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3920},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.3920},
}