Healing the Nation: Health Care, Philanthropy, and Ethnicity in Argentina, 1890-1940
Benjamin Bryce
University of Northern British Columbia
Friday, November 6
12:30 PM
Humanities 1, 520
In 1920, seven immigrant-run hospitals formed a fundamental part of the health network of Buenos Aires. The Italian, Spanish, British, German, French, Galician, and Jewish hospitals treated 20 percent of all hospitalized patients in the city. Through the revenue from paying patients and the large charitable donations solicited by female philanthropists, the wealthy immigrant men and women who ran these hospitals and dozens of other mutual aid societies in the Argentine capital strove to provide free services to working-class immigrants of a common cultural background. While the self-proclaimed leaders of these ethnic associations narrowly focused on providing social welfare services along ethnic lines and on maintaining their gender and class power within a community, this practice -- when repeated across groups in the Argentine capital -- had an impact on how other actors such as the state, the Catholic Church, and Spanish-speaking philanthropists involved themselves with social welfare.
Benjamin Bryce is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Northern British Columbia. His research focuses on migration, education, and health in Argentina and Canada. His work has appeared in the Journal of Social History, Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos, the Canadian Historical Review, and the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association.
