Tegualda Monreal Porcile (1917-2012) was an epidemiologist with exceptional commitment to public health and women’s reproductive health and rights. She left a legacy that informed health policies in Chile even into the 21st century, evident in the 3-cause abortion law that was passed in 2018. She completed her studies to obtain a medical degree in 1944 and retired from her last job as an epidemiologist at the Western Metropolitan Health Service in 2006. Her professional engagement in Chile was interrupted by the military coup of 1973; therefore, she moved first to the United States, then to Mozambique, and back to Chile in 1990. As we follow Tegualda Monreal’s career path, we can document the important contributions she made in the fields of critical epidemiology, in the treatment of specific health problems such as abortion, and in the lives of patients seeking to make important decisions about family size and voluntary motherhood. Furthermore, her life serves as a reminder of the dramatic changes that affected doctors under the military dictatorship. The same public health professionals who worked to improve the public health and social environment of their patients in Chile were persecuted after the military coup. Many, like Monreal, had to leave their homes to go into exile abroad. We seek to emphasize the specific contributions Tegualda Monreal made to the epidemiology of abortion. Together with Rolando Armijo and other health experts of the time, she pioneered an innovative approach to the problem of induced abortion and maternal mortality when they investigated and published for the first time about what they called the “abortion epidemic” in the early 1960s. Their studies on induced abortion demonstrate two related points: first, the field of critical or social epidemiology was significantly shaped by Latin American, and specifically Chilean, epidemiologists, who applied the results of their research and proposed health interventions to subjects of population planning. Secondly, by referring to the “abortion epidemic” they initiated a new approach to the problem. The treatment of abortion as an epidemic defined it as a social disease, based on the understanding that medical solutions to health crises had to be accompanied by measures that addressed the social and economic contexts of the disease.
Pieper Mooney, J. E. . (2025). Tegualda Monreal: acerca de epidemiología crítica y salud pública sin fronteras. Revista Chilena De Salud Pública. https://doi.org/10.5354/0719-5281.2025.78237
