Decentering Medical Orthodoxy: Women, Visual Regimes, and the Politics of Care in Chile, 1834–1950

Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney, History, University of Arizona

In this study, I argue that the consolidation of medical authority in Chile depended on women’s labor, knowledge, and professional presence, even as male physicians, state officials, and medical institutions sought to subordinate these contributions within gendered hierarchies. I begin in 1834 with the founding of the Escuela de Matronas (School of Midwives), which marked an early effort to institutionalize and regulate women’s roles in birth attendance. I end in the 1950s following the creation of the Servicio Nacional de Salud (National Health Service) in 1952, when the expansion of centralized public health consolidated and sought to stabilize the position of female health workers and mothers within a national medical order. Drawing on oral histories, archival records, and visual materials, I trace how sources classify forms of expertise as either central and scientific or as empirical and illegitimate. I show that medical authority operated not only through regulation and discourse but also through visual regimes that rendered certain forms of knowledge and care modern, credible, and trustworthy. These frameworks were gendered and worked to structure access to training, recognition, and authority, even as they remained unstable in practice. Women engaged institutional frameworks, reproduced them, and at times exceeded them. They adopted markers of scientific legitimacy to secure recognition, translated medical knowledge into domestic settings, and used institutional credentials to extend their authority. These practices produced structural ambiguities: women appear at once as supervised assistants and skilled practitioners, as objects of discipline and as agents in the making of care. By centering these dynamics, I show that medical authority in modern Chile did not simply emanate from institutions. It emerged through everyday interactions in which women and men defined what counted as legitimate knowledge and proper care.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 142. Contested Intimacies: Gender, Knowledge, Desire, and the Making of Authority Across Modernities