Mancia

Mancia is an independent, secular, apolitical organisation, open to medical-sciences professionals and students in the Spanish speaking world.

Introduction
Mancia carries out activities in the areas of healthcare promotion. Its primary objective is to serve in the interest of facilitating communication between medical-sciences professionals and students in the Hispanosphere. Added to this is the aim of health promotion within the community.

Etymology
Mancia means "the art of divination". Initially, the name of the first group was "Histomancia". Founding members were a group of student-teachers of histology and "Histomancia" was born as a pun: the art of divining tissue samples with a microscope. When the group's activities expanded to cover other courses, the name simply reverted to "Mancia". According to the founding members, the pun has not been lost, as in medicine and health-care many practices still rely heavily on divination.

Birth and Evolution
Mancia was born in March of the year 2002 as an informal enterprise on the web by teachers and students of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires of Argentina. In November of 2003 the first informal "Mancian Congress" was undertaken in Houssay Park, just opposite the main campus of the Faculty of Medicine. There, the principles of the organisation were established: its independent, secular and apolitical character, and its open nature to any medical related professionals and students. The group slowly grew to include teachers and students of other medical-sciences professions such as nutrition, physiotherapy, radiology, nursing, biochemistry, pharmacy and others. Likewise, it also expanded from being uniquely frequented by professionals and students of the University of Buenos Aires to include members of other national and private medical schools of Argentina and other countries.

Mancia today
Mancia carries out several activities in Argentina. The project "Mancianos en Accion" (Mancians in Action) carries out several tasks pertaining to primary care and prevention campaigns, as well as donations to health-care institutions. Mancia also actively circulates information and publicises the activities of Universities and scientific societies such as AECUBA (Society of Student-Scientists of the University of Buenos Aires) and FACES (Argentine Scientific Federation of Medical Students).