Physicians at the service of workers in Mexico City, 1930-1944

Abstract

This article reflects on the importance given to the training of specialists in occupational medicine in Mexico City from the 1930s. It highlights the association between this growing specialty and some ideas about social medicine that were developed at the same time. Attention is also paid to the gradual transformation of this association at the beginning of the next decade, when it was considered vital to consolidate and expand a modern hospital network, with the institution in January 1944 of a social security regime and the provision of medical services for urban salaried workers by the Mexican Institute of Social Security (Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social). In summary, it is argued that the parallelism and correspondence between work and social medicine reiterated by different physicians, including Alfonso Pruneda, took on other meanings with the predominance of the state hospital system, in which technical skills, medical specialization, and clinical data played a vital role in their approach to workers’ health problems.