Constitutional Medicine: Legislating Medicine and Medical Education in Nineteenth-Century

This paper is part of a larger project to understand how multiple groups and their conflicting demands modified the structure of public health services in similar circumstances of societies in evolution, revealing how patients and health care providers influenced health care and public health administration. My paper will examine the constitutional and legal validation of the medical juntas and medical education in Mexico, Guatemala, and Cuba in the first decades of the nineteenth century. First, I will look at the role of the colonial juntas, which were more likely to be temporary and established to address specific health crisis. Then I will examine the process of including the medical juntas either on a constitutional basis or as laws. Examining medical structures as political entities will provide a view of the negotiations between the state and the medical practitioners. Ultimately, this will provide an opportunity to examine the effect of politicalization of medical juntas in terms of the care that was available to the patients. I have focused on these three regions because they provide different scenarios for a similar process of change. Mexico represents the urban center, with a strong colonial bureaucratic administration and a protomedicato established in 1527. Guatemala was, in many ways, a backwater in the colonial administration, with a regional protomedicato established in the lat