Health, sanitation, hygiene, and welfare: Public policy in the age of the Mexican Revolution

The present dissertation examines public health and public welfare policy during the Porfiriato, the Maximato, and the revolutionary administrations of Lazaro Cardenas and Manuel Avila Camacho. The study analyzes policy from both before and after the Mexican Revolution, shows where continuities existed between these periods, and questions key assumptions made by previous historians about the relative importance of Porfirian and revolutionary policies. The dissertation proves that public health policy following the Mexican Revolution drew directly from earlier Porfirian policy. Subsequent administrations did go beyond the Porfirian agenda. The administrations of the Maximato brought existing welfare institutions under government control, and the Cardenas administration expanded welfare and offered it to any who asked. Motivated by a sense of social justice, revolutionary welfare programming also had the aim of social control, especially of the ignorant masses who lived in poverty. As had nineteenth-century positivists, revolutionary policymakers believed the Catholic and Indian ought to be redesigned. However, welfare expansion under Cardenas was short lived, and after 1940 the government combined health and welfare into one institution in an effort to control spending. The Avila Camacho administration justified its reform as a return to realistic policy that still benefitted the masses, one that contained within it the positivistic emphasis of science, reason, and public health programs. As a result, the administration expanded the construction of hospitals throughout the country to a degree never before witnessed in Mexico. Contrary to scholarly consensus, the present study finds that the Cardenas administration alone did not realize the only achievements of the Mexican Revolution in terms of health and welfare policy. The dissertation shows that developments both before and after Cardenas were equally important. It also breaks with the conventional analysis that revolutionary policy was always benevolent and beneficial, while Porfirian or conservative policy was either dictatorial or indifferent.