Reconsidering the peripheral in global health

have written an ambitious history of medicine and public health in Latin America that not only repositions this region in the global context, but also brings new insights into some of the most pressing contemporary debates in global health.This review considers some key contributions of this book, which overall question commonly held assumptions about the origins and trajectory of international and global health -pertaining most notably to the role of countries and regions normally deemed "marginal" or "peripheral."The foundation upon which these contributions rest is Cueto and Palmer's detailed account of the unique character of Latin American medicine and public health.The authors emphasize the pluralism of the region's medical scenario, which resulted from complex exchanges that went beyond the top-down imposition of a university-based orthodoxy.Instead, the book recognizes the interaction of multiple forms of medical and religious knowledge, whose elements and practices populations resorted to (and often combined).In practice, pluralism meant the coexistence of European, African, indigenous and, later, North American practices, as well as of popular and Western biomedical knowledge, so that the region became "a dynamic border between Western and non-Western medicine" (Cueto, Palmer, 2016, p.70).Here, the book interestingly argues that despite its homogeneizing tendencies, the growth of public health under the auspices of the modern nation-state did not lead to the erasure of popular and alternative medical practices.Rather, biomedical hegemony and popular medical "dissent" (p.119) coexisted quite peacefully.The authors suggest, for example, that healing cultures like santería and candomblé emerged, were consolidated, and expanded, within the structures of nationalism, urbanization, sanitarism, and medical research.The hegemony of doctors, in other words, paved the way for the interstitial presence of a diverse range of healers and priests.The account of this long process

Peripheral · Political science · Global Health and Surgery · Global Public Health Policies and Epidemiology · Internal Medicine · Medicine