Although his professional career began in 1981, Arturo Cruz had been treating patients since childhood: in elementary school he used to take a medical bag to school to treat his classmates’ scrapes. Son of the nurse-midwife Paula Mendoza Pacheco and the rural teacher Arturo Cruz Cruz, the youngest of the seven brothers knew since then the value of commitment, and soon he was sure of the profession he would choose for the rest of his life.
“My mom told me that you suffered a lot, that you had to study a lot,” he recalls, on the eve of his retirement as a family doctor at the Hospital General de Zona (HGZ) No. 7 of the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS), in the municipality of Cuautla, following 32 years of service.
His teachers: Luis Castelazo Ayala. “He guided and advised me on the specialty of family medicine in Mexico, of which I was part of the first generations.”
Porfirio Landazuri Laris. “He encouraged me to enter this specialty from the Teaching Headquarters of the HGZ Francisco del Paso y Troncoso, in Mexico City.”
Alberto Lifshitz Guinzberg. “A great teacher still in force in the teaching and learning process, who still practices medicine and has been Head of Teaching at the IMSS.”
Cuauhtemoc Abarca Chavez. “A great human being, a social activist from Tlatelolco and UNAM.”
Arturo Cruz joined patient care with other positions that allowed him to be in charge of tasks related to management, union struggle and municipal administration, to the point of serving as mayor of Cuautla during the period 2003-2006.
A scholarship from the National Autonomous University of Mexico led him to be the Internal Medicine Teaching Coordinator at the Hospital de los Venados, in Mexico City, before settling as a general practitioner at the IMSS clinic in Villa de Ayala, in 1984. He is president of the Association of Private Hospitals and Health Professionals.
