Family and Community Medicine was introduced to Costa Rica through the McGill-CENDEISSS Project of 1989-1994. The development of this new speciality is interpreted as a "professionalization" drive, which, while appropriating the discourse of the international primary health care movement, in fact places more importance, as a social movement, on negotiating for and expanding its own jurisdictional space. Two bodies of literature are called upon to provide theoretical guidance, namely, writing on "professionalization" and ethnographic interpretations of "development" in the so-called Third World. The phenomenon of Family and Community Medicine in Costa Rica is described as an international, national, and local movement. The town of Puerto Viejo de Sarapiqui is the focus of an ethnographic description of the speciality's local-level implementation.

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