María Elena Carrera

María Elena Carrera Villavicencio (1929 to 2026) was a Chilean physician and Socialist Party senator. Born in Santiago, she studied medicine at the University of Concepción, completed her last clinical years at Hospital del Salvador and the University of Chile, and qualified as a physician and surgeon in November 1955 with a thesis on the causes of prematurity. From 1958 to 1964 she worked as a pediatrician at the University of Chile's Child Psychiatry Clinic, at Hospital Luis Calvo Mackenna and at the Pedro Aguirre Cerda sanatorium, then moved into neuropsychiatry at San Juan de Dios and Félix Bulnes hospitals until 1967. She published studies on the causes of prematurity and on enuresis, served as a doctor in the National Health Service and took part in the Chilean Pediatric Academy. Her political career ran beside medicine: she served in the Senate of Chile, lived in exile after 1973, and during those years pursued postgraduate studies in public health in Havana and Berlin.