The Dangers That Surround the Child

Abstract

This chapter, along with Chapter 5, expands on the relations between the postcolonial economy and public health, taking on the two central health concerns of the postindependence period: tuberculosis and infant mortality. It emphasizes the limits of a medical nationalism that ignored the roots of disease in the neocolonial economy and show the growing demands for nationalist health policies that addressed poverty in addition to providing medical services and health education. It also explores the expansion in child and maternal health work in early-twentieth-century Havana in context of years of alarming infant mortality statistics. In response to this health crisis, officials organized the Children’s Health Service, which was responsible for the medical care of poor children, the creation of special sanatoriums for tubercular children, the supervision of midwives and wet nurses, the care and hygienic education of poor mothers and pregnant women, and other work as part of a holistic effort to reduce the city’s infant mortality rate. Despite calls from reformers, it remained up to private organizations to directly confront the economic basis of infant mortality.