Cuidar, controlar, curar

This collection seeks to provide Portuguese-speaking readers with a book that brings together research representative of the state of the art in the history of medicine and health in Latin America and the Caribbean. A diverse array of specialists from Latin American and North American institutions tackle a variety of subjects in the hundred-year span between the end of the nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth. As with all such collections, the book does not attempt to touch on all the research that has been carried out in this field. However, the editors’ selections do represent the paths that researchers have followed, especially since the 1980s, when historians, anthropologists, scientists, politicians, and other professionals began to study the history of disease and health with greater frequency and to seek to understand the complex interrelation between health and history in Latin America.Among the many important questions raised by these scholars, we make special note of the comparison between the different national experiences of medical scientists and healthcare practitioners; the relationship of medical science in Latin America to that in Europe and North America; the role of public health in the bureaucratization process and the expansion of state authority; the role of the politics of hygiene in different contexts and among different subject groups, such as immigration, “race,” and education; the relation between public health and nationalistic movements and ideologies; and the regulation of the diverse health professions and the resulting conflicts between “healers,” doctors, and other healthcare professionals. The actors presented in this set of narratives are varied, reflecting the authors’ thematic, methodological, and theoretical diversity. Aside from the state, institutions, doctors, and scientists, other people — such as healers, “sorcerers [feiticeiras],” patients, laborers, the military, obstetricians, and nurses — also populate these histories, demonstrating the wealth of experiences analyzed here. The diversity of the articles reflects the great “mosaic of approaches, styles, objects, and narratives” (p. 12), as well as the major trends in the historiography and historical methodologies currently employed in this field.To help readers orient themselves to this vast body of work, the editors identify three types of presentation that break away from the “heroic” narrative that until recently dominated the historiography of medicine and health. The collection seeks to exemplify those types, offering the reader a significant sampling of some of the best works of the field, all based on vast bibliographic and archival research. At the same time, the editors have also looked for points of contact that bring some sort of unity within that diversity. Thus, all the articles identify with principles derived from the revival of research into the relationship between health and history: for example, that illness is not only a biological phenomenon but also has historicity, and that the study of diseases reveals important aspects of the modern history of Latin American countries.Texts representative of the first narrative trend include those by Ana Maria Carrillo and of Jaime Benchimol. The first one analyzes the regulation of the health professions in revolutionary Mexico and the relationship between that process and the modernization process, as well as the strength of “alternative medicines,” which remained an important resource for the majority of the population. Jaime Benchimol’s article on the scientific debate over yellow fever at the end of the nineteenth century discusses a variety of themes, including the legitimization of bacteriology and the construction and institutionalization of scientific knowledge, as well as the relation between science, public health, and politics in Brazil. Articles representative of the narrative vein include that by Steven Palmer Luiz Antonio de Castro-Santos, which analyzes the interaction between the Rockefeller Foundation in Costa Rica and public-health programs already existent in that country, in the period between 1914 and 1921. He shows how the local government molded the North Americans’ project, questioning the assertion that the periphery always assimilated the science of the center acritically. Castro-Santos analyzes the hygiene movement in Brazil in the 1910s and 1920s, its importance in hygiene reforms, and the symbolic and material construction of the state.The third narrative style is represented by articles from Beatriz de Teixeira Weber and Diego Armus. The piece by Armus questions the literature that locates the medicalization of Brazilian society between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Using a case study from southern Brazil, the author discloses the coexistence (not always without conflict) of diverse healing practices and academic medicine, at least through 1930. Armus, focusing on the action of the patients, analyzes the struggle of tuberculosis patients for housing, treatment, and cures in Argentina in the 1920s through the 1940s, in the face of the medical field’s inability to provide answers.The texts are written in clear and accessible language. Through them, it will be possible not only for specialists but also those with a more general interest in Latin American studies to understand certain basic subjects that facilitate the understanding of the particularities of, as well the similarities between, modern Latin American and Caribbean societies

Bureaucracy · Health care · Ideology · Immigration · Latin American studies · Latin Americans · Library science · Political science · Politics · Portuguese · Public health · State (computer science) · Subject (documents) · History · History of Medicine and Tropical Health · Law · Medicine · Nursing · Public Administration