Epidemiología americana y filipina, 1492-1898 (review)

Abstract

Francisco Guerra's gift to readers, on his fiftieth anniversary of writing comprehensive medical histories and bibliographies, is a work that bespeaks his last name ("war"). Epidemiología americana y filipina is a frontal assault against the "Black Legend" that blames Spanish cruelty for the disappearance of the natives [End Page 142] of the American continent. From the first page Guerra indicates that demographic "abysses" cannot be explained by murder or battle, for the number of the fallen was very small in proportion to the population, and high mortality occurred mostly while Spaniards and natives coexisted peacefully in colonial times. He points to similar demographic catastrophes in English and French America, and compares these to the population of the Philippines, with its evolutionary and epidemic history related to Asia, which did not show a decline during the Spanish colonial period. Epidemiología is a monumental achievement, bursting with rare and unexpected information, such as differential mortality rates by race; the geographic transmission routes of diseases; early uses of prevention methods (quarantine, inoculation, cohorting); sixteenth-century Mexico's "hospital republics" (towns of native Americans established with a hospital as their center); diseases introduced into Haiti by African-American immigrants from the United States (1824-26); and the Latin American humor in giving names to epidemics.