“El marxismo dará salud a los enfermos”: idea clave de la medicina social latinoamericana

Resumen

This article analyzes the work “El Marxismo dará salud a los enfermos” (1954), by the Mexican born Frida Kahlo. Methodologically, we applied the immanent analysis proposal based on the Lukacsian aesthetic perspective. We start with a brief description of Frida's trajectory  emphasizing her abovementioned work. Next, we make analogies with premises of the Latin American Social Medicine, highlighting three decisive aspects of the social determination of health: the ontological character, the dialectic nature, and the political horizon. We emphasize that, both in Frida's work and in the main authors of Latin American Social Medicine (both influenced by Marxism), the key idea that health, in capitalism, consists in the manifestation of the antagonism between capital and labor. This key idea represents, then, the synthesis between singularities, particularities, and universality as well as the organic articulation between the biological and social spheres, which presupposes a certain political character, in the sense of the answers that this articulation raises and the horizon of health transformation, in its multiple dimensions.