The Beginnings of School Health in Buenos Aires

Abstract

ABSTRACT: to progress and compete with Europe and the United States. The Generation of ‘80 had to think of strategies to inhabit the vast territories and take control of the great immigration waves coming mostly from Europe and the Middle East. The State began to exercise functions such as civil registration, control of cemeteries, prenuptial tests and public education; these tasks were performed until then by the Catholic Church, which did not welcome the new provisions. Population growth was vertiginous: Buenos Aires went from 177,787 people in 1869 to 1,231,969 in 1909. This resulted in labor crises, problems of overcrowding in tenement houses, worsening of urban hygiene and higher rates of infectious diseases, raising concerns in sanitarians like Coni, Rawson or Wilde. The latter called for a pedagogical congress, as a result of which the year 1884 saw the adoption of the Law 1420, that dictated common, compulsory, free and secular education. Many functions of the School Medical Corps come from this law. The first health services in schools started to operate during the term of the second president of the National Education Council, Benjamín Zorrilla. To this end, the Council created on the 6th of May 1886 the School Medical Corps, whose regulations and staff were completed by 1888.