Chile and the covid-19 pandemic: remembering social medicine in the context of the neoliberal crisis

Abstract

Ever since the “social outburst” protests of October 2019 and the covid-19 epidemic of 2020, Chilean society has experienced a period of intense social and sociomedical conflicts that have thrown the neoliberal model of development into crisis. The pandemic powerfully highlighted the ways this model operated in terms of health: it prioritized earnings over lives, inequality, and repression instead of dialogue, among other things. In this context of crisis, remembering social medicine, which was developed in Chile in response to the epidemics of the late nineteenth century, has resurfaced as a project.