Health and Medicine in the circum-Caribbean, 1800-1968 by Juanita De Barros Steven Palmer David Wright

Author:Juanita De Barros, Steven Palmer, David Wright [Juanita De Barros, Steven Palmer, David Wright]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Americas, Caribbean & West Indies, Modern
ISBN: 9781135894825
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2010-11-16T05:00:00+00:00

THE EMERGENCE OF PUERTO RICO’S FIRST MEDICAL ASSOCIATION

Elite medical practitioners sought to achieve a political status that could influence the US colonial state. More specifically, as the following sections will show, physicians’ underlying motives for turning themselves into professionals, and their attempts to negotiate and maintain their special position, originally challenged the colonial state’s threat to their social location. In this challenge, the AMPR fashioned an ideology that preceded similar political developments in favour of Puerto Rican autonomy. Initially, the AMPR opposed the US colonial state as a “conqueror of race, language, laws, customs, and banner”; insisted it “constrained”; “invaded”; “strikes and implants … all official channels of new and regulated activities”. The AMPR distinguished its “culture, language, and standard of work”.40 The early history of the AMPR included professional struggles to gain a special location within the economic order, which influenced the character of social stratification in Puerto Rico.

One important spokesperson for this ideology and for physicians was the AMPR’s first president, Dr Manuel Quevedo Báez. He received his medical education in Spain and was involved in a series of important medical institutions, including the Boletín Médico, the Board of Medical Examiners, and the Academia de Medicina. He was also involved in cultural institutions, and served as the president of Ateneo Puertorriqueño, a member of the Antillian Academy of Languages, director of a children’s magazine, and president and professor at the Instituto Universitario José de Diego. He founded the AMPR and presided over the AMPR’s inaugural session before the Cámara de Delegados (House of Representatives) in San Juan.

The AMPR formed on 21 September 1902 at around the same time that Rosendo Matienzo Cintrón began a campaign to defend the “Puertorrican personality” within US colonial politics. Trained physicians concurred with Cintrón’s idea that there was something both unique and in crisis about being a Puerto Rican. Like the Unionist Party that would soon result from Cintrón’s campaign, and that would continue struggling for greater political autonomy, the AMPR sought a political legitimacy that physicians tied to their professional status and autonomy from the US colonial state. Their strategy was similarly based on elucidating the difference of the “Puertorrican personality”, which physicians based on “culture, language, and standard of work”. They hoped to clarify the “scientific and social problems” corresponding to pathology and hygiene and, in this way, influence Puerto Rican politics.

To pursue their goals, the AMPR obliged all associates to practice “absolute fidelity, discipline, and observance of statutes which include support of bodies that could one day help the AMPR,” including the SBOH. Although it was debated within the AMPR, the association’s support for the SBOH was part of a defensive strategy to protect elite physicians’ material interests.42 Its emphasis was evident when Quevedo Báez stated that the new medical association’s primary objective and purpose was “none other than the defense of the material interests of the class first, performing as many gestures as necessary for those close to official spheres, and later, to study and discover other means that may exist for this defense”.

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