Introduction: landscapes of Latin American health, 1870-1970.
Palmer, Steven ; Agostoni, Claudia
This special issue of the Canadian Journal of Latin American and
Caribbean Studies features four articles originally prepared for the
colloquium, Practicas, objetos y actores de salud en America Latina
durante el siglo XX: Continuidades, cambios e innovaciones ("Health
Practices, Objects, and Actors in 20th Century Latin America:
Continuity, Change, and Innovation"), held at the Universidad
Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. (1) The articles are preceded by an
interview with Diego Armus, conducted during the colloquium, on
historiographical trends in this dynamic field of studies. The issue
closes with an afterword from Ernesto Arechiga, originally delivered in
Mexico as a commentary on the possible intersections of these four
historical views on medicine and health in Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, and
Costa Rica with classic themes in Latin American thought. Taken
together, the six contributions capture one fragment of an absorbing
conversation on the history of health, hygiene, and medicine in Latin
America in the 20th century that has been going on for the past six
years, linking a network of scholars from across the Americas. It is a
conversation that has been sustained and renewed in a series of meetings
that began at the Rockefeller Archive Center in the environs of New York
City, continued at the Casa Oswaldo Cruz on the outskirts of Rio de
Janeiro and at the UNAM in Mexico City's Ciudad Universitaria, and
crossed the pond to Manchester, England, with further gatherings in the
Canada-US borderlands and Buenos Aires.
Our exploration of landscapes of Latin American health itself marks
a crossroad on the topography of a new field of study. What we would
like to do in this introduction is give readers a sense of the larger
research dialogue and network of which the interventions collected here
form a part. We will refrain from any extended consideration of the
growing literature in the field of health, disease, and medicine in
Latin American history, as this is the subject of the interview with
Armus that sets the stage for the articles that follow. Instead, on the
one hand we will register, measure, and describe the "Cultures of
Hygiene in Latin America" project: a dynamic research network on
the history of health and medicine in Latin America that, paradoxically,
has yet to generate a collective publication that brings together work
by all of its members. On the other hand, we will indicate ways that the
partial sample collected here is representative of this larger project
and the many fruits that have come of it.
In the autumn of 2003, historically minded scholars of Latin
American medicine and public health from Argentina (Armus), Brazil
(Gilberto Hochman and Nisia Trindade Lima), Canada (Palmer), Mexico
(Agostoni), Peru (Paulo Drinot), and the United States (Alexandra Minna
Stern) gathered at the Rockefeller Archive Center in the Pocantico Hills
along the Hudson River in New York. (2) The site was a good starting
point. The Rockefeller Foundation had all but invented the modern
apparatus of international health over the first half of the 20th
century, and took a particular interest in Latin America because of the
area's special place in the foreign gaze of the United States and
its overlap with the tropical health environments that captivated the
Rockefeller research and operational agenda. The Foundation had also
found that its own personnel shared the Western medical background of a
wide range of Latin American health practitioners, something that was
not the case in other parts of the tropical world. Not surprisingly, one
important source for the rejuvenation of Latin American medical history
in the late 1980s was a new history of public health that made extensive
use of the Rockefeller Foundation's
Latin America-rich records, housed at an archive centre directed by
the accomplished historian of science, Darwin Stapleton. (3) Many of us
had worked on questions of public and international health and their
relation to US empire building and Latin American state formation, and
some of us had worked at the archive center before.
The idea of our first meeting, however, was to create a new wave of
research, more in tune with the social history of medicine and the
cultural history of disease, that would examine the complementary and
competing cultures of hygiene in the 20th-century Latin American city.
We planned to focus on three overlapping arenas: first, on the role of
rules, legislators, physicians, and public health officials in producing
normative ideas and instructions related to hygienic practices; second,
on the production (in advertising and education) of textual and visual
discourses related to hygiene; and finally, on the ways in which
different social groups incorporated those hygienic prescriptions for
modern urbane living. We defined "cultures of hygiene" as a
web of values and prescriptions that transcended the physical and the
corporeal. From our work on diverse topics, we had come to appreciate
that higienismo was infused with codes of morality and respectability,
and encouraged shifts in behaviour in terms of self-approbation,
individual responsibilities, narcissism, and self-discipline, as well as
the consumption of symbolic or material novelties. A key issue in these
cultures of hygiene was that they were produced and contested at the
intersection of disease prevention, education, and consumption in a
heterogeneous and diverse, new and burgeoning Latin American urban
milieu (4) (Agostoni et al., n.d.). Alongside this exercise in defining
the research theme, we shared ideas on key textual reference points and
proposed possibilities for joint research collaboration. Our discussions
focused on the creation of a network to offer complementary training to
graduate students who were working at our different institutions, the
building of a website to compile intriguing documentary material for
dissemination and teaching resources, and of course the publication of
edited collections. The meeting was, by design, nicely amorphous and
unwieldy; a basic description of the historical problem was elaborated,
and plans were made for a second gathering in Rio de Janeiro in 2005.
Culturas da higiene na America Latina Moderna was hosted and funded
by the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, the social science and humani ties division
of Fundacao Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz), the public health research agency of
the Brazilian Ministry of Health. The main campus at Manguinhos sits on
the site of the original laboratory complex built by Brazil's
exceptional health scientist, Oswaldo Cruz, in the early 20th century as
a serological facility and a basic medical and bacteriological research
centre. Sited on what was then the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, now
marking the expansive city's northern zone with the wild morisco
minaret of the original research palace designed by Cruz himself,
Fiocruz houses one of the largest groups of historians of medicine and
health in the world. A product of the progressive institutionalization of the history and social science of public health and medicine starting
in the second half of the 1970s, the Casa was created in 1986 to
preserve and consider the history of Fiocruz itself as a vital part of
Brazil's (and the world's) history of science. It has matured
into a research centre with universal concerns, though still
specializing in Brazilian topics. In 2001, modelling itself with quiet
ambition on the University of London's Centre for the History of
Science, Medicine, and Technology and the Department of History of
Science, Medicine, and Technology of the Johns Hopkins School of
Medicine, the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz inaugurated what has become one of
the world's largest single graduate programs in the discipline. The
Casa is now in the global vanguard of research in the field of social
studies of science, medicine, and public health. It also has rich
documentary and photographic archival holdings on the history of science
and public health, promotes a wide variety of virtual and real projects
to bring the history of Brazilian science to the public, and edits and
publishes the important open-access journal on the history of science,
medicine, and public health, Historia, Ciencia, Saude--Manguinhos. Part
of the unique quality of this Brazilian contribution is its willingness
to incorporate an interdisciplinary approach to historical scholarship,
with anthropologists, political historians, philosophers, and critical
theorists animating the project, both among faculty and in the pages of
the journal, and with a corresponding consideration of the way that
science, medicine, and public health have informed and transformed the
development of the social sciences. (5)
The original group that had met at the Rockefeller Archive Center
presented papers for critical review by the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz
community, and also held more informal seminars with other Brazil ian
researchers. We heard from graduate students such as Tamara Rangel, then
finishing a Master's degree and now a doctoral candidate, who
presented a paper on the role of doctors in the construction of
Brasilia, and from a post-doctoral visitor to the Casa, Beatriz Teixeira
Weber, professor at the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (Rio Grande
do Sul), who enchanted the group with a presentation on homeopathy in
the Brazilian south. Gilberto Hochman presented his work on the growth
of medicine and health as goods and services to be consumed by the
growing middle classes of urban Brazil in the 1940s and 1950s. In a
public session before a full house of students and researchers of the
Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, the non-Brazilian visitors presented their work.
After having a quiet meeting room in a former Rockefeller mansion
to ourselves, this round of public presentations in the leading centre
of research into such matters in Latin America was a salutary, if
humbling, coming out. The thematic focus on cultures of hygiene in the
city nicely animated the work developed for presentation in Rio, but
most of us had also, by force of circumstance and lack of strictures,
gone our own way. Papers by Drinot on the mapping of prostitution in
Lima, by Palmer on the way the control of hygienist discourse became a
fulcrum for the nationalist aspirations of Cuban doctors in the late
Spanish Empire, by Armus on hygiene and education at the primary and
secondary school levels between 1890 and 1940 as an instrumental way to
shape future hygienic citizens, and by Stern on the detailed mapping and
breakdown of space that gave bite to the Panama Canal Commission's
containment of tropical disease--each in its own way exceeded the rubric
of the original prospectus and seemed to converge more around questions
of hygiene as utopian political projects.
We spent one afternoon making a concerted effort to put together an
ambitious "proposal text" that all could draw from to seek
major research funding for the entire network from their respective
granting sources. Perhaps it was already evident, however, that it was
more important that our research network serve as a matrix for sharing
ideas and launching a variety of collaborations rather than as a formal
project to generate a determinate set of academic products. There was
something liberating about a discontinuous and disparate network of
institutional resources and scholarly energies periodically coming
together on the basis of shared sensibility, and this also exceeded the
model of a research team driven by the logic of a single institution or
funding narrative. One of the refreshing aspects of this collaboration
has been the absence of what might be described as the "Northern
donor dynamic," which always carries the risk that Latin America
will become a resource for the mining of data to be circulated in a
discussion dominated by North American or European academic circles (to
whom its greatest value accrues), with a few Latin American guests
present for authenticity's sake. Instead of having to struggle to
resist this dynamic, we found--not without surprise--that we could pool
heterogeneous resources to renew our dialogue on many different stages
and settings, and that we could rely on the financial and academic
interest and support of diverse colleagues and institutions.
This decentred model and polyvalent approach to historical research
collaboration have not led to high "productivity indicators"
as defined by contemporary academic measurement indices that are
exerting an ever-greater and ever-more pernicious hold on patterns of
research and publication. That is, it has not generated publications for
the participants as a formally constituted research group; indeed, this
special issue is the first peer-reviewed publication to emerge from one
of our events. The result has been an enabling network that has lent a
strong hand in generating and sustaining a substantial number of
traditional and non-traditional projects. Among other things, members of
the network have used collective resources and energies to found
innovative websites and online journals (6); to introduce historical
sections into new journals aimed at health professionals and social
scientists concerned mostly with the present (7); to inject
transformative energies and provide an international context to the
seminars, publications, and activities of national centres of debate in
history of medicine and health (8); to promote comparative regional
joint research (9); to identify graduate and post-doctoral residencies
for young scholars from Latin America (10); to set up contiguous and
occasionally intersecting research groups on related topics (11); and to
throw together our Latin American "cultures of hygiene" group
with other ambitious research networks working on themes in the history
of medicine and health definitive of distinct regions, like the creole
sciences of the non-Spanish Caribbean. (12) It is, of course, impossible
to untangle these synergies or definitively trace any of these
initiatives back to the original research group--it is hard to say that
they would not have happened in any event given the interests,
connections, and trajectories of those involved. But it is possible to
say that some--perhaps most--would not have happened at all, and it is
quite certain that none would have happened in the way that they have.
One might say that the whole is greater than the sum of deliverables,
and the impact factor greater than any formula could ever measure.
In November 2008 we came together for our third meeting in Mexico
City, again with new voices introducing themselves, among them a medical
anthropologist and physician from Costa Rica, Maria Carranza, and the
Mexican social historian, Ernesto Arechiga. Cultures of hygiene in the
Latin American city--our starting point in 2003--continued to inform the
contribution of most colloquium participants. In the case of those
included in this special issue, however, that original set of concerns
evolved into considerations of the way that social, political, and
environmental topographies of rural health were encountered, negotiated,
narrated, and defined by medical actors formed in a predominantly urban
milieu. The coherence of our session is a nice example of the way that
clusters of research interests have converged within our more expansive,
and often elusive, shared research agendas. It seemed the perfect time
to try to seize the moment and transcribe it into this special issue.
Special Issue
On first glance, each of the articles in this issue appears to
focus on the agency of highly schooled and, to varying degrees, elite
actors in the Latin American health universe. Taken on these terms, the
articles are a reflection of neither the concentration of our network of
historians nor the great diversity of subjects being tackled in this new
field of study. Nevertheless, perhaps the quality of this sample of
scholarship that makes it most representative of the research network
that first came together in 2003--the same quality that keeps our
conversation going--is a shared historical sensibility: all the articles
are iconoclastic, searching for the unexpected, foregrounding
counter-currents, delighting in unusual characters, and locating
intellectual and scientific practices in specific social, political, and
natural landscapes. Another shared feature is that all bring medical
events and processes out of the arena of health or science and show them
to be processes playing themselves out at the very centre of politics
and society--and playing key shaping roles. Finally, they also show that
non-medical actors and issues are often the main drivers of the
medicalization of Latin American landscapes.
Our interview with Diego Armus is an attempt to liven up the
obligatory historiographical, methodological, and theoretical preamble
to a collection of this kind. Armus has been successful in bringing
together and presenting the rich results of the new history of medicine,
health, and disease in Latin America. Over the past eight years, he has
edited or co-edited four collections of work on these subjects, one
published in English in the United States, two in Spanish in Argentina,
and another in Portuguese in Brazil (Armus 2002, 2005a, 2005b; Armus and
Hochman 2004). This astonishing body of work has been crowned by his
highly original study of the culture of tuberculosis in Buenos Aires
that is being published more or less simultaneously, in slightly
distinct versions, in English and in Spanish (Armus 2007, in press). His
grasp of the emerging field--or "subfield," as he somewhat
modestly insists on calling it--and its future possibilities reveals
three ways of writing the history of health and disease in Latin
America. The first is the product of a rethinking and
recontextualization of themes common to the traditional history of
medicine (medical pioneers, scientific breakthroughs, leading
institutions) achieved by focusing on medical technologies, medical
failures, and ordinary practitioners, as well as on the national and
international networks that impinged upon the circulation and adjustment
of biomedical knowledge in the world periphery. The second tendency is
driven by a history of public health that stresses power relations: the
construction of the state vis-a-vis problems of health and health
institutions, as well as the way that economic, social, and political
structures shape the formation of public health and state medical
apparatuses. The third line of inquiry is a socio-cultural history of
disease, concentrating on patients, caregivers, physicians, and
institutions, and taking into consideration the representations,
imaginaries, ideas, metaphors, and mediations relative to health and
disease.
In each case, Armus finds that these trends--and the ever-greater
fragmentation of the object of study that is their result--are
reflective of developments in the field outside Latin America, and
indeed of contemporary historical practice itself. In addition, Armus
reflects on the particular importance that constant, creative, and
imaginative dialogue has for advancing the historical interpretations of
health institutions, caregivers, patients and the sick, state policies,
and external and internal influences. He underlines that such a dialogue
among Latin American scholars would benefit from the collaboration of
political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians, a
collaboration or interchange of ideas and agendas that needs to be
sustained in contextualized narratives and with strong empirical
foundations. Though Armus is reticent to propose any grand specificity
for the contribution of Latin Americanists to the field, the interview
reveals a set of particular impulses and tendencies that give the Latin
American body of work in this area a unique concentration in issues such
as international health, medical pluralism, and the role of medicine and
public health in state formation.
Steven Palmer's article identifies a medical fault line
running through Cuba that opened up during the events of 1898 and shows
how this rift produced a sudden and radical transformation in the
research agenda of Juan Santos Fernandez, a leader in Cuban science
between 1875 and the US intervention and occupation in 1898. A pioneer
in the field of intertropical pathology, both as an ophthalmologist and
as director of the island's principal research institute during the
late Spanish empire, Santos Fernandez conceptualized the diseases of
warm climates as a fulcrum for the acquisition of Cuban scientific and
political sovereignty. Over the years of the occupation (1898-1902)--a
span that saw US military doctors use Carlos Finlay's hypothesis
and early research on mosquitoes to solve the yellow fever puzzle (which
Santos Fernandez's team had been agonizingly close to working
out)--the Cuban ophthalmologist became a vocal opponent of the
proposition that there existed a domain of medicine specific to the
tropics or any pathologies particular to different races. This dramatic
reversal of his earlier research assumptions reveals, from the
perspective of what had suddenly become a "medical periphery,"
a rupture in the nature and international politics of tropical medicine at the turn of the last century.
In Claudia Agostoni's "Medicos rurales y brigadas de
vacunacion en la lucha contra la viruela en Mexico, 1920-1940," the
theme of the reconceptualization of rural health as a
"commodity" for the con solidation of the state and the
organization of officially sponsored smallpox control measures are
addressed through the study of the rural immunization campaigns that
took place from the 1920s to the 1940s. The smallpox control programs
implemented at that time overlapped with the prominence assigned to
health promotion and education by post-revolutionary governments, and
they led to the widespread presence of health professionals and numerous
medical students in Mexico's rural milieu for the first time.
Agostoni argues that the efforts to control the spread of smallpox
required not only massive vaccination, but also instilling among the
rural population notions of public health, preventive medicine, and
hygiene that disregarded the cultural and social diversity of the
country, as well as its deeply embedded urban-rural inequalities.
Nisia Trindade Lima's article looks at the construction of
rural Brazil in medical terms by doctors and social scientists between
1910 and 1960, with a particular focus on the medical metaphors and
contradictory notions of rural illness and resistance to modernization
that were strongly present in the institutionalization of the social
sciences in Brazil in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as in the prevalence
of and combat against yellow fever in Brazil's rural environment.
Lima examines the intense medical, intellectual, social, and political
debates that surrounded the "rediscovery" of Brazil, the
emergence of the metaphor of the country as a "huge hospital,"
and the increasing participation of a wide range of actors who
contributed to building this metaphor through their eclectic incursions
into the country's backlands in search of the causes of rural
suffering and the obstacles to rural health. The author sheds light on
the persistence of key "imaginaries" that have surrounded the
country's history, among them the social and cultural dichotomy
between the sertao (the backlands or the interior) and the litoral (the
littoral or the coast). Furthermore, Lima explores in what ways the
arena of public health was nurtured by collaboration, appropriation, and
constant dialogue among physicians, sociologists, and other social
researchers, and underlines that the complexity and plurality of the
country's medical practices, both scientific and popular, are
issues that have shaped the limits of medicalization of Brazilian
society.
Maria Carranza's "'In the name of the
forest'" examines the role of foreign agronomists, most of
them specialists in forestry either from the United States or trained
there, in promoting birth control and family planning in Costa Rica
during the 1960s and 1970s. The article proposes that we must also look
outside the world of medical specialists and the population control
agenda of foreign states and foundations to understand the rapid rise of
fertility control efforts in Latin America. Carranza stresses the
significance of technological innovation, in particular the invention of
simple intrauterine devices that could slip under the official radar, in
allowing a radical transformation in the medicalization of reproduction.
She homes in on the complexities of the interaction of medical ideas and
inventions, cosmopolitan institutions and foreign agents, local medical
communities, and popular participation in places with a history of
acting as "social laboratories." Carranza's study is also
an expression of the tendency, noted by Armus, to use oral history to
reconstruct the medical landscapes of the past 50 years and an example
of the rich results that can come of this approach, not only for
retrieving the patient's view but also for understanding the
practitioner's motives and operations.
Ernesto Arechiga's contribution sheds light on the
multifaceted imaginaries and fictions that have permeated Latin American
culture and identity since the 19th century and that are present in the
contributions to this special issue. He underlines the geographical,
cultural, ethnic, and social diversity of the region, a diversity
present among the actors, themes, and preoccupations of the articles
contributed here. In addition, he extracts a common thread from them: a
constant state of anguish that has nurtured the thoughts of numerous
intellectuals, politicians, institutions, and health professionals from
the 16th to the 20th centuries, an anguish and pessimism that have also
led to the strengthening of the dichotomies of civilization vs.
barbarism, urban vs. rural, or medicine vs. empirics and superstition.
Arechiga is particularly keen to underline that recuperating the voices
of the patients, the sick, or the numerous caregivers--by integrating
both a bottom-up and a top-down approach--would allow a more thorough
and detailed understanding of the medicalization processes that have
taken place in Latin American history, culture, and thought.
We hope that these contributions will find in the Canadian Journal
of Latin American and Caribbean Studies a particularly apt venue and
audience for registering the existence of this project, for the journal,
too, has long been a vessel for a shared set of sensibilities and a
network of contacts speaking in the various tongues of the Americas.
With great pleasure we invite readers to listen in on one afternoon of
discussion about new currents in the history of Latin American health,
medicine, and disease that took place in and around a pleasant room
flooded with light from the green yard of a tranquil conference hall
nestled in the botanical garden of the historic campus of that great
Latin American institution of higher learning, la Universidad Nacional
Autonoma de Mexico.
Works Cited
Agostoni, Claudia, ed. 2008. Curar, sanar y educar. Enfermedad y
sociedad en Mexico, siglosXIX yXX. Mexico: Instituto de Investigaciones
HistoricasUniversidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico y Benemerita
Universidad Autonoma de Puebla.
Armus, Diego, ed. 2002. Entre medicos y curanderos: cultura,
historia y enfermedad en America Latina moderna. Buenos Aires: Grupo
Editorial Norma, 2002.
--, ed. 2005a. Avatares de la medicalizacion en America Latina
1870-1970. Buenos Aires: Lugar Editorial, 2005.
--, ed. 2005b. Disease in the history of modern Latin America: From
malaria to AIDS. Durha, NC: Duke University Press.
--. 2007. La ciudad impura. Salud, tuberculosis y cultura en Buenos
Aires, 1870-1950. Buenos Aires: Ensayo Edhasa.
--. in press. The ailing city: Tuberculosis in Buenos Aires,
1870-1950. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
--, and Gilberto Hochman, eds. 2004. Cuidar, controlar, curar:
Ensaios historicos sobre saude e doneca na America Latina e Caribe. Rio
de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz.
Cueto, Marcos, ed. 1994. Missionaries of science: The Rockefeller
Foundation in Latin America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
--, ed. 1996. Salud, cultura y sociedad en America Latina:
Nuevasperspectives historicas. Lima: Instituto de estudios peruanos
(IEP) - Organizacion panamericana de la salud (OPS).
Palmer, Steven, Danieli Arbex, and Gilberto Hochman. 2009. Smallpox
eradication and a good place to eat: A Canadian scientist's 1967
Brazil travelogue. Cultures of Health: A Historical Anthology
<http://hih.uwindsor.ca>.
Notes
(1) The meeting, held in November 2008, was sponsored by the
Instituto de Investigaciones Historicas and the Direccion General de
Asuntos del Personal Academico Project PAPIIT IN400807-3 of the UNAM,
and by the Canada Research Chair in History of International Health at
the University of Windsor.
(2) The meeting was sponsored by seed money from the Rockefeller
Archive Center, then of Rockefeller University. We thank the Center and
its excellent staff for their support and assistance.
(3) Marcos Cueto's edited volumes (1994; 1996) were key points
of departure for other important studies.
(4) C. Agostoni, D. Armus, P. Drinot, G. Hochman, N. Lima, S.
Palmer, and A. Stern, prospectus for "Cultures of Hygiene in the
Latin American City."
(5) Nisia Trindade Lima, "Casa de Oswaldo Cruz. Centro de
memoria, pesquisa historica y divulgacao cientifica em saude." The
following publications of the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz are of particular
importance: Historia, Ciencias, Saude--Manguinhos; Cadernos da SaUde
Publica; Ciencia & Saude Coletiva; and Memorias do Instituto Oswaldo
Cruz. The Casa Oswaldo Cruz also houses the archives of Oswaldo Cruz,
Carlos Chagas, Belisario Penna, and other researchers and institutions.
See Guia do Acervo da Casa de Oswaldo Cruz at
<www.coc.fiocruz.br>.
(6) Steven Palmer founded Cultures of Health: A Historical
Anthology <http:// hih.uwindsor.ca> in 2008 with the editorial
collaboration of all members of the original "Cultures of
Hygiene" research network and directly influenced by the
discussions on a web nexus that took place in Tarrytown; Diego Armus
helped to launch the Argentine website Histoira de la salud y la
enfermedad in 2009.
(7) Under the impetus of Diego Armus, the creation of the history
section of Salud Colectiva, a new Argentine journal
<http://www.scielo.org.ar/ revistas/sc/eaboutj.htm>, has
translated into a key method of disseminating, among the public and the
community of health specialists at large, how historians work with the
subject of public health.
(8) Claudia Agostoni coordinated the research seminar,
"Historia social y cultural de la salud en Mexico, siglos
XVIII-XX," that gathers established historians, as well as
undergraduate and postgraduate students, with the aim of discussing in
what ways medicine, public health, and the metaphors and definitions of
the body in sickness and in health have penetrated, transformed, and
contested Mexican society and culture from the 1800s to date. Some of
the results of that collective effort can be found in Agostoni (2008),
as well as in the publications that have emerged from the collective
research project "Salud, higiene y reconstruccion. Campanas
sanitarias y educacion higienica en la ciudad de Mexico, 1890-1940"
(PAPIIT IN400807), which deal with hygienic education, vaccination
campaigns, and preventive medicine during the final years of the
Porfirio Diaz regime, the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution, and the
post-revolutionary governments, topics on the research agendas of
numerous Latin American researchers.
(9) Gilberto Hochman's Fiocruz research project "Pesquisa
sobre a historia comparada dos programas de erradicacao da malaria, da
variola e da poliomielite no Brasil" has important potential for
comparative research with the Mexican smallpox vaccination campaigns,
and Hochman has worked with Palmer and Arbex (2009) on the history of
the Canada-Brazil vaccine collaboration during the WHO's smallpox
eradication campaign in the 1960s and 1970s.
(10) Funding for Brazilian doctoral and post-doctoral candidates to
pursue research residencies in Canada is under the auspices of the
Canada Research Chair in History of International Health at the
University of Windsor and the Department of History at the University of
Guelph.
(11) Gilberto Hochman, Steven Palmer, Nisia Trindade Lima,
Dominichi Sa, and Simone Kropf organized the seminar "Patologias da
Patria" that took place in March 2008 in the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz
and included the presentation of the research results of postgraduate
students and researchers.
(12) Paulo Drinot, Laurence Brown, and Michael Worboys,
"Cultures of Hygiene/Creole Sciences Symposium," University of
Manchester, UK, 3-4 September 2009.
STEVEN PALMER
University of Windsor
CLAUDIA AGOSTONI
Instituto de Investigationes Historicas,
Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico
