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RESUMEN La caracterización de sanadores no-titulados como "charlatanes" o "impostores" ha influido notablemente en cómo han sido percibidos por la opinión pública y en las investigaciones académicas. Se creó, entonces, una división entre los médicos profesionales y aquellos que adquirieron su conocimiento de modo tradicional y noacadémico. Este artículo cuestiona la supuesta división entre dichos especialistas en el campo de la salud para ofrecer un cuadro más complejo y rico de prácticas locales a partir del caso peruano. A partir, sobre todo, de correspondencia de la Facultad de Medicina de Lima y de avisos en periódicos, reconstruimos la dinámica de las autoridades médicas en sus intentos, muchas veces infructuosos, de contener y excluir a sanadores de origen asiático, europeo o local. Para ello, estudiamos dos artefactos diseñados para legitimar y monitorear a los médicos formados profesionalmente: los títulos o diplomas y las listas de graduados, predecesores de nuestros modernos documentos de identidad y bases de datos.ABSTRACT The characterization of non-professional healers as "quacks" or "impostors" has influenced much of how such actors have been perceived by public opinion and in academic research. As a result of this, a divide has emerged between professional physicians, on the one hand, and those who acquired their knowledge in a traditional and non-academic way, on the other. This work questions the alleged divide between these two groups in the health field in order to offer a more complex and richer picture of local practices in Peru. Based mainly on correspondence from the Faculty of Medicine in Lima and newspaper ads, we reconstructed the attempts made by medical authorities to contain and exclude healers of Asian, European, or local backgrounds, many of which failed. For this reason, we studied two specific devices designed to legitimate and monitor physicians trained professionally: degrees or diplomas and lists of graduates, both of which are predecessors to our current identification cards and databases.

In this essay, I examine the controversy around the "Carnet de la Patria," a national identity card issued in Venezuela in December 2016. I argue that this ID card belongs to a larger project of surveillance and regulation of identity developed by the Bolivarian Revolution and implemented by the late Hugo Chavez, and continued by current president Nicolas Maduro. Amid its worst economic crisis, the government claims that the new ID card will allow citizens better access to goods from supermarkets, replacing the fingerprint system ("captahuella") that provoked massive protests in 2014. Opponents to this document have highlighted the parallel with the cards that exist in Cuba ("ration books"), and the manipulation of the database system to benefit only those who support the government and are already registered in previous official databases. The Venezuelan case provides an intriguing scenario that defies the regional region addressed to provide personal cards to undocumented groups. It also provides valuable comparative lessons about the re-emergence of surveillance technology and identity cards in modern authoritarian regimes.

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Bioethics professor Debora Diniz of the University of Brasilia has written a beautiful as well as compelling account of the tragic months between the first alerts of the Zika virus and the official efforts by the Brazilian government and the scientific community to contain the virus in the country while preventing its expansion worldwide. What may have been expected to be a clean account of how the virus was discovered and finally quashed instead is a dramatic narrative of the complex, tense, and at times contradictory actions and decisions taken to fight an enemy with a none-too-clear identity. The original version of the book, Zika: do sertão nordestino à ameaça global, was accompanied by an award-winning documentary which is now available on YouTube. Diniz is also the co-founder of Anis: Institute of Bioethics, which focuses on the intersection of bioethics and human rights in Latin America.The text goes beyond a simple chronicle of Zika's spread, and maintains an impressively personal touch while describing the technical and scientific procedures. One of its main goals is to introduce a clear narrative of the problem as well as the intricate and simultaneous paths adopted by physicians and scientists until the virus was confirmed to be Zika. Unlike other narratives of epidemics, where the focus centers on how the disease was contained and describes an active, organized team effort, the picture that emerges from this episode is a rich yet somber scenario of actors, policies, and non-human agents. The ethnographic perspective pays off, allowing readers to follow mothers mourning their newborns, bitter disputes among scientists, and the way in which government offices deliberately ignored contributions from the Brazilian northeast. Zika and its carrier become an excuse to dissect how science is produced, contested, and legitimized as the result of myriad regional, gender, and professional tensions. At the same time, science is elegantly disassembled into its basic units to restore the humanity behind it.Diniz has done a remarkable job explaining the complex genealogy of the virus in lay terms, from its isolation in Uganda in 1947 until its last known outbreak in French Polynesia.