The process of medicalization of pregnancy in Chile: Centuries of positioning and discursive legitimation

Abstract

This article aims to understand how occurred the medicalization of pregnancy in Chile, that is, context, steps and conditions that favored its development. Therefore, revised published in newspapers and medical journals between 1835 and 1938, a period in which include important events in the history of the national obstetrics, which will be analyzed in light of the contributions of Michel Foucault and Peter Conrad about the expansion of medical glance on the population, noting that since then a number of strategies that place the pregnant body in the center of the practice of medicine are produced.