'My gratitude to the great and honourable Trauma. I take it in my heart’. Integral rehabilitation for injured workers in the state traumatological hospital, Chile 1938-1942 - C
| Dates: | 24 May 2016 |
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| Times: | 13:00 - 14:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | Faculty of Life Sciences |
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| Speaker: | Andrea Del Campo Peirano |
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This seminar is part of the lunchtime seminar series for the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM). Lunchtime seminars are typically no more than 30 minutes in length, followed by a period for audience questions (ending before 2pm). All are welcome.
Andrea Del Campo Peirano (CHSTM, University of Manchester0
Abstract:
In 1937 the first traumatological hospital was founded in Chile. This centre, constructed and equipped with the most advance technology, aimed to rehabilitate injured workers. The Traumatological Institute belonged to a semi-fiscal accident insurance company, which had been created as a non-profit alternative to private insurance companies. The institution embodied the broader state’s concern for workers’ security and well-being. Inside the walls, patients published El Accidentado del Trabajo injured worker, where through poetry, reports, letters and codes of behaviour, among others, they shared their daily matters. Exploring this magazine, this paper will present patients’ thoughts and feelings about the hospital, their treatments and the security system that framed them. As an expression of popular culture, working class identity and patient experience, the magazine provides a genuine and different perspective to approach workers’ relationship with a welfare institution and its professionals. In addition, I will argue that authorities and professionals intended to use hospitalization for more than medical and professional rehabilitation. They aimed to ‘educate’ workers intellectually and behaviourally. In this respect, the hospital acted in line with the political aspiration of working class improvement. El Accidentado shows patients felt intense gratitude for the healthcare and opportunities they found in the hospital, and pressed other fellows to behave in a ‘civilised’ manner. Yet, the magazine also reveals that other patients manifested indifference or rejection, perhaps against paternalism or the will to modify what they believed was the worker’s identity.
Speaker
Andrea Del Campo Peirano
Organisation: University of Manchester
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
2.57
Simon Building
Manchester
