The Pediatrician’s Practice: Genaro Sisto and the School Medical Care

Abstract

The aim of this work is to reconstruct the career and ideas of Genaro Sisto (1870-1923). We will focus on his work as school doctor, his views about the ways of intervention that the State should promote according to the psychosocial and environmental demands of deprived childhood, the school doctor profile, school meals and the eradication of infectious diseases in schools.
These axes allowed us to gain a closer acquaintance with this physician’s thinking, which was the outcome of his experience and the adaptation of European developments to local characteristics. Sisto was one of the advocates of pediatrics during a period when children became objects of study of medicine, psychiatry and pedagogy. He belonged to the hygienist generation of doctors, who believed that children were the base to regenerate the race. His work as a pediatrician, his membership of the Cuerpo Médico Escolar and his participation in the Sociedad Argentina de Pediatría make him one of the most mentioned personalities in academic studies, however the least researched. Unlike other doctors of those times who became influential by their public activities and profuse publications, Sisto’s ideas can be traced in magazines specialized in school medical care, in El Monitor de la Educación Común, in publications of health organisms such as the National Departamento Nacional de Higiene, in short leaflets edited by local printers and in both national and international lectures
which he delivered.
These documentary sources are used from a qualitative perspective to reconstruct the trajectory of the school pediatrician and his scientific approaches as regards diseases that affected the development of childhood and of primary school education in general.