Speeches and practice of hygiene in the fifties at Medellín

Abstract

This article develops the way in which the modernization process of the city has affected its health policies. Public health was constituted as an articulated object of interests to administrators, medicine doctors, sanitary engineers, and technical personages who have visualized it as a definitive subject for the progress. Its speeches decided on a lay vision causing that the moral considerations moved from a religious to a civic order, erecting as main argument or "technology of believes" the existence of race degeneration that put in risk the "Antioquian" identity.