Avatares de la medicalización en América Latina, 1870-1970

Diego Armus’s new collection pairs original analyses with previously published work to show readers how scholarly research on the history of medicine and public health in Latin America has developed in recent years. Armus says he selected essays that focus on Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico between 1870 and 1970 because the historiography for those countries is especially rich. The articles feature topics ranging from a sensation-causing painting that depicted the 1871 yellow fever epidemic in Buenos Aires to the comparative institutional history of public health and social-service agencies in twentieth-century Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. The volume presents several carefully selected approaches to the “new” history of medicine. At the same time, it makes work previously published in Portuguese and English available to Spanish speakers and brings scholarship published in Mexican and Brazilian journals to the attention of scholars in Argentina, where the book was published.Readers familiar with Armus’s 2002 edited collection, Disease in the History of Modern Latin America (Duke Univ. Press), will recognize the volume’s first essay, in which Armus charts the origins of the “new” history of medicine. He shows how the newer work differs from more traditional histories that offer biographies of famous physicians or discussions of scientific discoveries, and that portray the practice of medicine as a never-ending march of progress. Armus argues that recent work is characterized by three themes: emphasis on the social, political, and cultural dimension of epidemics; consideration of the links between disease and nation building; and examination of the power relations embedded in discussions of bodies, sickness, and cures.The volume is organized geographically, beginning with studies of Argentina, followed by work focusing on Brazil and Mexico. The essays on Argentina are unpublished, as is one of the essays about Brazil. Two essays, those by Laura Maolsetti Costa and Sérgio Carrara, focus on the ways in which illness has been represented culturally. In her study of the image of yellow fever in Buenos Aires, Malosetti Costa discusses the intense public discussion provoked shortly after the 1871 epidemic by the presentation of an oil painting that depicted a nursing child clutching at his dead mother’s breast, as doctors and public health officials look on. Malosetti Costa argues that “this image contributed to the emergence of a new sensitivity to sickness and death” and underscored the importance of inculcating so-called modern public health measures in the city (p. 43). Carrara’s essay, “Estrategias anti-coloniales: Sífilis, raza e identidad nacional en el Brasil de entreguerras,” draws on a variety of sources, including theater dialogue, to demonstrate the diffusion of discourses about syphilis in early twentieth-century Brazil, where they informed larger discussions about national identity.A discussion about race and eugenics features prominently in the collection. Nísia Trinidade Lima and Gilberto Hochman, like Carrara, explore the links between disease and national identity in Brazil. In their previously published “Condenado por la raza, absuelto por la medicina: El Brasil descubierto por el movimiento médico-higienista de la primera república,” they show that early twentieth-century doctors initiated rural hygiene campaigns under the belief that residents of the countryside were racially inferior and degenerate compared to city dwellers; however, the authors argue, this contact with hinterlands led doctors to conclude that the health situation in such settings resulted more from the public sector’s neglect than from the inherent degeneracy of the people. In her examination of hygiene campaigns in Porfirian Mexico, Claudia Agostoni shows that physicians interested in preventive medicine similarly advanced the use of public hygiene programs as a way to redeem the population from the ills from which it suffered. In Mexico, according to Agostoni, public officials especially targeted mothers as the “natural” vectors of hygiene education. Alexandra Stern’s study of demographic discourses around mestizaje between 1920 and 1960 shows how Mexican social scientists mixed an international blend of theories linking race, body, crime, and society into a uniquely postrevolutionary ideology. Agostoni’s article appeared previously in Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, and previous versions of Stern’s have appeared in edited collections released in Mexico and in the United States.Four additional articles round out this collection. Armus employs social and cultural history to understand the strategies of protesting tuberculosis patients in Argentina sanatoria at the turn of the century, while Eric Van Young reviews the work of three Mexican authors who focus on the history of mental health and psychiatry in the country. Susana Belmartino’s analysis of the differences among public health institutions in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile employs a decidedly political-science perspective. And Simone Petraglia Krops, Nara Azevedo, and Luiz Otávio Ferreira examine the medical research leading to the discovery and treatment of Chagas disease from the perspectives of social and institutional history.While readers may be familiar with some of these essays, Armus’s creative assembly of original and previously published articles will be welcome to those who have not had an opportunity to appreciate the range of issues the “new” medical history addresses. They may wish, as well, to consider how to apply some of the featured approaches to new diseases, fresh topics, or alternative national or regional contexts

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