Reviewed by: Avatares de la medicalización en América latina 1870-1970 Diana Obregón Diego Armus , ed. Avatares de la medicalización en América latina 1870-1970. Colección Salud Colectiva. Buenos Aires: Lugar Editorial, 2005. 304 pp. No price given (paperbound, 950-892-214-1). This collection of ten essays, most of them already published somewhere else in either Spanish, Portuguese, or English, follows the themes of three other compilations published by Diego Armus in the last few years: Gilberto Hochman and Diego Armus, eds., Cuidar, controlar, curar: Ensaios históricos sobre saúde e doença na América Latina e Caribe (2004); Diego Armus, ed., Disease in the History of Modern Latin America: From Malaria to Aids (2003); and Diego Armus, ed., Entre medicos y curanderos: Cultura, historia y enfermedad en la América Latina moderna (2002). The current volume tackles the complex interactions between disease, social representations, medicine, and politics in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico (one of the articles includes Chile). Three of the essays deal with disease—tuberculosis, Chagas disease, and syphilis—although in very different ways. Armus shows that TB patients in Argentina were far from passive, demanding a specific type of therapy and strongly opposing measures taken by the health authorities. Distancing himself from Foucauldian approaches, Armus seeks to demonstrate that patients' numerous protests prove that however strong it may have been, medical power was counterbalanced. Using concepts from the social studies of science, Simone Petraglia Kropf, Nara Azevedo, and Luiz Otávio Ferreira challenge current approaches to Chagas disease history, analyzing the long process by which it was constructed as a particular entity and [End Page 892] established as a social problem. Not only Chagas was instrumental to this recognition, but also later agents and institutions in both Brazil and Argentina. The papers by Sérgio Carrara on syphilis and by Nísia Trinidade Lima and Gilberto Hochman on the Brazilian hygienic movement are complementary: they both approach the beliefs of the early twentieth-century Brazilian intellectuals and physicians about race, disease, national identity, and the backwardness of the nation. Carrara focuses on intellectual and common representations of syphilis in Brazil—particularly the dispute over its origin, its incidence, and the potential of the Brazilian society to become modern, given the racial mixture of its population. He understands these debates as a partly failed anticolonialist and nationalist strategy of the Brazilian elite in a need to overcome metropolitan pessimistic images of the nation. Lima and Hochman study how the leaders of the Brazilian hygienic movement (1899–1930) dissociated themselves from the polar positive or negative opposites, and made possible the institutionalization of public health as a professional activity. The chapters by Claudia Agostoni and Alexandra Stern on Mexico also converge on medical ideologies/practices, and state formation: Agostoni looks at late nineteenth-century works on hygiene by Mexican physicians who came to believe that the education of women, particularly mothers, in the tenets of hygiene was vital to the progress of the nation. Stern explains the emergence of biotypology in mid-twentieth-century Mexico as a continuation of both the late nineteenth-century cult of the mestizo and the eugenic movement of the 1920s. Mexican biotypologists, using tools such as statistics, sought to convey a less racist viewpoint, but—like their Brazilian peers, as discussed by Carrara and by Lima and Hochman—they faced the logical difficulties of overcoming openly racist European and U.S. medical and social theories. Eric Van Young's article focuses on the general psychiatric hospital of Mexico City in the early twentieth century as a modernizing project, and reasons about the complexity of this topic for a history of the Mexican state, or for a cultural history of the subaltern groups. Susana Belmartino criticizes structuralist approaches to the subject of the emergence of health systems, comparing Argentina, Brazil, and Chile between 1920 and 1970, and the differences of their health arrangements in relation to their particular political organizations. The touching painting of a woman who died of yellow fever in the 1871 Buenos Aires epidemic is the topic of Laura Malosetti Costa's piece. It is intriguing why this otherwise cogent article appears...
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Jun 1, 2009
Kaori Kodama 
Open Access
