![]() ![]() Therefore, in Puerto Rico the pursuit of health is fundamental for the creation and maintenance of civilization.Īntonio Fernós Isern, Commissioner of Health, 1944. The healthier these countries are, the stronger they will be to fight adversity. These countries, lacking material resources, depend almost exclusively on workers’ arms and labour. From the perspective of poor Puerto Ricans, however, they were part of the materialisation of its promise of social justice for the poorer classes.Ĭountries of limited resources must take special care of the health of their inhabitants in order to maintain their progress and norms of civilization. Programmes like milk stations became part of strategies to rear and manage the labour force needed in the industrial development model promoted by the PPD. The experience of public health professionals in relief work during the 1930s contributed to the articulation of food and nutrition as key elements of this party’s populist discourse. In this context, the nourishment of children’s bodies assumed symbolic and instrumental significance for the reconfiguration of colonial and developmental models promoted by the new Popular Democratic Party (PPD). Innovations in nutrition knowledge and an emerging rural hygiene movement highlighted the negative health effects of the island’s monocrops economy. During the Depression, these perspectives fostered a recast of the eugenic regeneration ideologies motivating medical assessments of and sanitary interventions with Puerto Rico’s rural poor since the nineteenth century. This article investigates the organisation of milk station programmes on the island during this crucial period and how these reflected the circulation of child welfare knowledge, nutrition expertise and public health practices. Between the 1930s and 1960s Puerto Rico was transformed from a marginal United States territory into an industrialised ‘showcase of development’. ![]()
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