Description
Book SynopsisPoisoned Eden analyzes the social, political, and cultural effects of three cholera epidemics that shook the northwestern province of Tucumán, Argentina, and the role of public health in building the Argentine state in the late nineteenth century.
Trade Review"Historians and students alike have much to glean from this richly researched and engagingly written monograph. The fact that it has been published in our own 'COVID years' makes it an even more compelling read."—Kelly Urban, H-LatAm
"
Poisoned Eden is recommended to researchers, students, and anyone interested in the history of medicine, the history of South America, and the history of cholera pandemics."—Gabriel Lopes, H-Sci-Med-Tech
“Convincing and carefully researched. . . . Dimas uses the history of epidemics in a province of the Argentine Interior as a way to examine social, cultural, and political dimensions of cholera as well as the changes and continuities in the process of state-making at the provincial and national levels. . . .
Poisoned Eden is a valuable addition to the current Latin American historiography of health, disease, and medicine.”—Diego Armus, author of
The Ailing City: Health, Tuberculosis, and Culture in Buenos Aires, 1870–1950“Dimas masterfully uses three cholera epidemics to examine state-building, medicalization, and contestation over disease origins and treatment in nineteenth-century Argentina.
Poisoned Eden shows that epidemics are moments of crisis as well as opportunity, and the book illuminates how states govern during a medical crisis—providing especially useful insights in the age of COVID-19.”—Nicole Pacino, associate professor of history at the University of Alabama–Huntsville
“The primary source and archival research for
Poisoned Eden is outstanding. Carlos Dimas has put in a tremendous effort poring over newspapers in the Tucumán archives and bringing in other sources that add texture to the story of the politics of cholera epidemics. There is a lot of rich historical-geographical detail in the narrative.”—Eric D. Carter, author of
Enemy in the Blood: Malaria, Environment, and Development in ArgentinaTable of ContentsList of Illustrations
List of Tables
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Biomedical Uncertainty and the Politics of Public Health
Part 1. Foundations and Context
1. A Garden in the Republic: Land, Labor, and Life in Nineteenth-Century Tucumán
2. The Global Age of Cholera: Argentina’s Late Confrontation with Cholera
Part 2. Environments and Peripheries in the Fourth Pandemic
3. Regional Health: Cholera from the Frontlines of the Paraguayan War to Tucumán, 1865–67
4. Provincial Health: Contestations over Governance in Tucumán and the Limitations of Medicalization during the Cholera Epidemic of 1867–68
Part 3. The Politics of Contagion and Political Conflict
5. The Plague of Fear: The Politics of Sanitary Cordons and Questions of Governance in the National Cholera Epidemic of 1886–87
6. The Cholera Epidemic of 1886–87 in Tucumán: From Provincial Health to National Health
Part 4. Medical Expansion
7. Purifying the Land against Cholera: The Epidemic of 1894–95 and Medical Expansion in Tucumán during the Era of Reform
Epilogue: Uncertainty, Futility, and Thinking of Cholera under COVID-19
Notes
Bibliography
Index
