The prevention and rehabilitation of disability as an educational and health policy (Argentina, 1960-1970)

Abstract

This article examines the actions of the National Health and Social Education Directorate, in Argentina in the sixties, to promote educational policies in relation to the prevention and rehabilitation of occupational “disability”. In accordance with developmental imperatives, the local agenda was organized around three axes: prevention of workplace, domestic and road accidents; the dissemination of fundamentals and practices of modern rehabilitative medicine and its incidence in the physical, social and productive “recovery” of people with disabilities; and, lastly, popular and employer awareness about the “residual ability to work” of rehabilitated patients. Official records and technical reports issued by international organizations and the first thirty volumes of the Revista Educador Sanitario, the official publication of the agency during the decade, made up the corpus of sources. Based on the documentary analysis, the predominance of continuities regarding the protection of the rights of injured workers and the universal state guarantee in the care of disabling conditions is conclusive, since the innovations, that were promoted under the developmental rhetoric, resumed and expanded the agenda and institutional initiatives inherited from the Peronist government (1946-1955).