Montevideo Takes Manhattan: The Latin American Provenance of the Global Children’s Health/Children’s Rights Movement

A public lecture by Anne-Emanuelle Birn, Professor and Canada Research Chair in International Health at the University of Toronto.


Co-sponsored by the Center for the History of Medicine and the Program in Science, Technology, and Society.

In 1933 Uruguay established the world’s first Ministry of Child Protection, and the following year adopted a “Children’s Code" as part of its commitment to “defend all of the rights of the child.” With this measure, Uruguay became a world leader in assuring that children’s rights were not only rhetorically invoked but could be realized, and child health improved, through redistributive public policies. This talk examines from a historical perspective the provenance, paradoxes, and resonance of Uruguay’s integrated, rights-based approach to child well-being and explores how its child health and welfare ideas and practices shaped developments in the Americas and globally in the twentieth century.

Anne-Emanuelle Birn is Professor and Canada Research Chair in International Health at the University of Toronto. Her research explores the history of public health in Latin America and the politics of international health. Her books include: Marriage of Convenience: Rockefeller International Health and Revolutionary Mexico (University of Rochester Press, 2006), Textbook of International Health: Global Health in a Dynamic World (Oxford University Press 2009), and the forthcoming Comrades in Health: US Health Internationalists, Abroad and at Home (with co-editor Ted Brown).