Health, Welfare, and a Nation-In-Transition: The Philippine Sanidad in the Late U.S. Colonial Period

Abstract

The dissertation is a history of public health, medicine, and welfare in the late U.S. colonial Philippines. It argues that the late U.S. colonial period, roughly the late 1920s–1941, witnessed the emergence of the Sanidad, the health-centered welfare state that evolved from the health bureaucracy of the early years of colonial conquest. Already captured and predominantly administered by Filipino doctors, the Sanidad was endowed with an expansive public authority that encompassed various levels of policymaking and agenda-setting—from the departmental-ministerial, down to the level of the provincial municipio. At the eve of the Pacific War, the Sanidad's presence had been established throughout the Islands, from the capital Manila to the provinces. It deployed a variety of approaches, from the preventative to curative, from the medico-carceral to medico-technocratic, so much so that the Sanidad generated new forms of material, institutional, and symbolic power. Finally, the Sanidad brought about new articulations of health citizenship from several stakeholders, including public and private medical interests which clashed at various points in history on the issue of state-provided healthcare.