Change and continuity in the hospitals of Buenos Aires (1870-1910)

Abstract

Argentine society, and in particular that of Buenos Aires, underwent farreaching social changes during the second half on the nineteenth century. Mass immigration, the growth and transformation of the working class sectors, and the rapid process of urbanization gave rise to the design of specific policies for social control that involved increased interventionism by the state. During this process of growing intervention by the state, the main strategy for charitable work employed up to that time in the field of health care and control of poverty was gradually replaced by other strategies involving a «capillary» control of society. Even so, the hospitals as an institution, the cornerstone of the old charitable policies, continued, for budgetary, administrative, and ideological reasons, to play a central role in the new system, increasingly based on welfare. The author explains how this continuity limited the scope of the new health care system conceived by the almost prominent physicians of the time.