Description
Book SynopsisChallenging traditional approaches to medical history, this work advances understandings of disease as a social and cultural construction in Latin America. It provides a look at the research in the history of medicine through essays about how disease was experienced and managed in different Latin American countries and regions, at different times.
Trade Review“This book is an extraordinary contribution that brings together the very best scholars of Latin American public health and social history. Its emphasis on the social conditions that lead to epidemic disease as well as the political and social forces that shape practice is a welcome corrective to a literature still too often dominated by positivist traditions.”—David Rosner, director of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health, Columbia University
”I was fascinated by all the essays in
Disease in the History of Modern Latin America. They are theoretically aware and sophisticated while they remain accessible and oriented to the complexity of historical experience. This collection is a powerful argument for the richness of an interdisciplinary approach to cultural history.”—Daniel James, author of
Doña Maria's Story: Life History, Memory, and Political IdentityTable of ContentsPreface vii
Disease in the Historiography of Modern Latin America / Diego Armus 1
“The Only Serious Terror in These Regions”: Malaria Control in the Brazilian Amazon / Nancy Leys Stepan 25
An Imaginary Plague in Turn-of-the-Century Buenos Aires: Hysteria, Discipline, and Languages of the Body / Gabriella Nouzeilles 51
Tropical Medicine in Brazil: The Case of Chagas’ Disease / Marilia Coutinho 76
Tango, Gender, and Tuberculosis in Buenos Aires, 1900–1940 / Diego Armus 101
The State, Physicians. and Leprosy in Modern Colombia / Diana Obregón 130
Revolution, the Scatological Way: The Rockefeller Foundation’s Hookworm Campaign in 1920s Mexico / Anne-Emanuelle Birn 158
Between Risk and Confession: State and Popular Perspectives of Syphilis Infection in Revolutionary Mexico / Katherine Elaine Bliss 183
Dying of Sadness: Hospitalism and Child Welfare in Mexico City, 1920-1940 / Ann S. Blum 209
Mental Illness and Democracy in Bolivia: The Manicomio Pacheco, 1935–1950 / Ann Zulawski 237
Stigma and Blame during an Epidemic: Cholera in Peru, 1991 / Marcus Cueto 268
Nation, Science, and Sex: AIDS and the New Brazilian Sexuality / Patrick Larvie 290
Contributors 315
Index 317
