Relationship between medicine, politics and pedagogy: knowledge and practices (France, Colombia and Mexico, 19th and 20th centuries)

Abstract

INTRODUCTION. The article examines the relationship between medicine, politics and education in three countries in the 19th and 20th centuries: France, Colombia and Mexico. METHOD. A comparative study is carried out. These countries were chosen because of their common approaches in the development of a State hygienism in the 19th century, which influenced educational policies and orientations. RESULTS. Thus, at first, it is shown how medical influence intervened in pedagogical practices in France, with changes in school spaces, preventive practices and health-oriented practices in the classroom, driven by teachers increasingly receptive to health messages. The European medical influence reached Latin America. In Colombia and Mexico, we analyze, in a second moment, how physicians became not only emblematic figures of public health and health policies in education, but also how they themselves became pedagogues and didactics of health, to promote an ideology where hygienism and then eugenics dominated. These influences and their interrelationships were not alien to the three countries, and the strong link between continents is highlighted, first of a Western medicine, which would later give way in Latin America to a North American influence in the twentieth century. DISCUSSION. Similarly, these influences follow the evolution of knowledge about the human body and the development of societies, the concern of a dominant physical hygiene in the nineteenth century giving way to a mental hygiene and social hygiene in the twentieth century.