Abstract
Peru's first cancer control public outreach scheme started in the 1910s, but ground to a standstill as it attained official governmental recognition in 1926 as the Liga Anti-Cancerosa (LAC). This paper explains the developments leading to that earliest effort to enlist a coalition of State health agencies, physicians, and lay people in a campaign to publicize early signs of this disease, as well as the medical and political reasons for and implications of its decline. Besides highlighting the importance of professional initiatives shaping cancer activism, contextualizing the rise and fall of the LAC calls attention to the effects that hospitalization of cancer treatment had on aspects of cancer care that were not directly treatment-related, such as public outreach.
Highlights
Peru’s first cancer control public outreach scheme started in the 1910s, but ground to a standstill as it attained official governmental recognition in 1926 as the Liga Anti-Cancerosa (LAC)
Like other Peruvian physicians at the time, he supported enrolling a broad coalition of State health agencies, physicians, and lay people in campaigns to broadcast the early signs of the disease
This paper focuses on such public outreach, a topic which is drawing more attention (Buschini, 2014; Carrillo, 2010; Teixeira et al, 2007) among the multifaceted historiography of cancer in Latin America (Lana, 2016; Eraso, 2014; Cuperschmid et al, 2014; Teixeira et al, 2011; Andrade et al, 2010; Eraso, 2010; Mejía, 2008)
Summary
In a 1922 letter to the editor of London’s Pall Mall Gazette and Globe, Peruvian physician Juan José Mostajo addressed the shortcomings of Britain’s cancer control efforts. Public outreach for cancer control began again in the late 1930s within the Instituto Nacional del Cáncer (INC), but sidelined the LAC and weakened its plan of action The LAC stalled in the late 1920s as Leguía fell and the notion of cancer as an illness requiring complex forms of clinical intervention gained strength This view of cancer as a disease requiring hospital-based care by the 1930s allowed older surgical and newer radiology specialists to work somewhat harmoniously, building on earlier traditions of collegiality and resource-sharing, at least for a while. The INC was unable to absorb all of the LAC’s initiatives, squandering its accumulated experience and resources, and wound up relegating public outreach to a subordinate status within its bureaucracy, something its leaders would notice and lament in the 1940s as they struggled to explain their re-launch of public outreach efforts
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