Science, Sight and the Ordering of Colonial Societies Fernando Feliú

At the beginning of the twentieth century, yellow fever, malaria, and cholera manifested themselves through devastating epidemics; however, other diseases, such as uncinariasis, or “hookworm disease,” popularly known as anemia, also wreaked havoc, particularly among the Puerto Rican population. According to Blanca Silvestrini, at the close of the nineteenth century the mortality rate for anemia reached nearly 90 percent, a figure higher than that of either malaria or yellow fever. Although by the final third of the nineteenth century, Salvador Brau, Francisco del Valle Atiles, and Manuel Zeno Gandía had made note of the endangered health of Puerto Rico&s;s rural populations and the deplorable conditions in which they lived, anemia still had not received the necessary attention from health authorities. This attention was not given until 1904, when army doctor Bailey K. Ashford managed to convince health authorities of the need to design a plan for eradicating anemia. That same year, the U.S. War Department named Ashford as president of the Anemia Commission, a body subsidized by the state and charged with organizing and directing the hygiene campaigns in the coffee-growing towns of Puerto Rico&s;s interior. My intention here is to examine the theoretical and practical strategies behind these campaigns. I identify two principal mechanisms: the first, rendering the visible invisible; and the second, rendering the invisible visible. In addition to fighting the disease, the interaction of both mechanisms had a colonizing role: they helped to shape a health code vertically imposed upon the Puerto Ricans. The health code illustrates what Foucault calls the “microphysics of power,” or measures that permit the state to exercise direct control over the body and conduct of the citizen ( Discipline (b), 26–27). The interaction of these mechanisms produced a series of binaries, among them that of civilization versus barbarism, the racial contrast between black and white, and the tensions between the modernization of the island and the weight of a premodern tradition, all of which correspond to what Abdul Jan Mohamed calls the “Manichean allegory.”

Archaeology · Colonialism · Optics · Physics · Sight · History · History of Medicine and Tropical Health · Latin American Cultural Politics · Migration, Health, Geopolitics, Historical Geography