Aaron Rom Moralina

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 departmentalministerial, 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 medicocarceral 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.

Informit is an online service offering a wide range of database and full content publication products that deliver the vast majority of Australasian scholarly research to the education, research and business sectors. Informit is the brand that encompasses RMIT Publishing's online products ...

The essay provides an analysis of the Philippine public health system. It enumerates the various reasons as to why the late U.S. Philippine public health was an entirely different insular executive agency from its previous form in the early 1900s. The essay then investigates the efforts to devolve some of Manila’s capacities to provincial governments. Finally, it relates these efforts’ success to the public health system’s maturation from a carceral-by-default colonial sanitary regime to one that provided lifesaving public goods.

In this essay I seek to examine the prewar roots of U.S. bilateral health missions in the 1930s U.S.-occupied Philippines. George C. Dunham, who was the chief of the Institute for Inter-American Affairs (IIAA) in the 1940s, led the construction of health infrastructure of many Latin American countries during the wartime period. The IIAA’s main bureaucratic mechanism for health agenda-setting in Latin America, dubbed as the Servicio model, was later taken by the U.S. Department of State as the template for bilateral health programs under the United States Operations Missions (USOM) that implemented Point Four economic development aid in Third World countries during the Cold War. I seek to foreground the Servicio’s prominent features by exploring Dunham’s career as the technical adviser in public health of the U.S. Insular Government in the Philippines in 1931–35. Dunham was responsible for numerous health and development policy initiatives in the Philippines during a crucial time when the colony’s political independence was nearing and a New Deal liberal served as its last American governor-general. The essay argues that Dunham’s career—specifically, the power relations that he came to be familiar with; the forces of obstructionism that he dealt with; and, most important, the structural elements that he did not dare challenge—prefigured the centralizing and antipolitical nature of technocratic authority that he transplanted in Latin American via the IIAA, which later became the agenda-setting template for U.S. bilateral health missions.