Endemic Goiter and El Salvador’s Battle Against Cretinismo
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9488797 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Heather Vrana (University of Florida Associate Professor of Modern Latin America, Department of History, , US, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 128 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1587-1617 |
| Publication date | 2023-12-05 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The American Historical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-8762 • E-ISSN: 1937-5239 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ahr/rhad377 |
| OpenAlex | W4389330332 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
One concern for Salvadoran and other Latin American public health researchers across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the purported link between goiter (bocio) and cretinism (cretinismo). Goiter is empirical medical condition that is inseparable from scenes of social and political inequality, neocolonialism, development, and war, however effectively the tools that measured it often obfuscated these factors. This article draws on more than a century of goiter research and representation in popular culture to argue that goiter research was part of broader health discourse that focused on poor and rural women and girls in an attempt to improve the productive and reproductive potential of El Salvador. It discusses how goiter research positioned El Salvador as a site of knowledge production for global health. It also proposes that goiter is best understood as a disability and uses insights from critical disability studies to understand how certain groups of people were constructed as problem populations. Over time, understandings of goiter shifted and new explanations came to the fore, but the lingering association of goiter with inheritable disability proved difficult to shake
Eugenics · Goiter · Latin Americans · Pathology · Political science · Politics · Public health · Social science · Sociology · Thyroid · Gender Studies · History of Medicine and Tropical Health · Internal Medicine · Law · Medicine · Medicine and Dermatology Studies History
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |