FROM “LOVELY HELPER” TO “MODERN ASSISTANT”. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PHYSICIANS AND SOCIAL VISITORS IN PUBLIC HEALTH. SANTIAGO, CHILE, 1925-1940

The article characterizes and analyzes the presence of social visitors in the hospitals of the Chilean Charity Board, between 1925 and 1940, a period among the creation of the first School of Social Service and the opening of public social service schools dependent on the Ministry of Education. Born to assist medical staff, through home visits that reported on the social and housing conditions of the patients and transmitted to them the prescriptions of medicine, the visitors also forged in these years a professional identity that spread beyond the borders of hygiene. This identity, a mixture of heterogeneous elements, tried to find a synthesis between the heteronomous desires imposed on them from their medical knowledge and their own aspirations for professional progress, and was forging, very germinally, a broader profile that transcended their condition of complementary helpers and moved to other spaces of knowledge and practice.