Medicine and Public Health in Latin America

Abstract

Despite several studies on the social, cultural, and political histories of medicine and of public health in different parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, local and national focuses still predominate, and there are few panoramic studies that analyze the overarching tendencies in the development of health in the region. This comprehensive book summarizes the social history of medicine, medical education, and public health in Latin America and places it in dialogue with the international historiographical currents in medicine and health. Ultimately, this text provides a clear, broad, and provocative synthesis of the history of Latin American medical developments while illuminating the recent challenges of global health in the region and other developing countries.

Social medicine and international expert networks in Latin America, 1930–1945

“…Moreover, it is fair to say that the 'circulation' of ideas was not complete, as Latin America's influence on European social medicine appears to have been minimal. However, it may be the case that their impact was delayed, given the key role played by Latin American states in forming the WHO, based on principles of universal social and health rights (Cueto & Palmer, 2015).…”

“…Not surprisingly, the Latin American governments most involved with the ILO already had some semblance of a social insurance system, and Chile stands out in this respect (Cueto & Palmer, 2015;Labra, 2004). The official publications of Chile's CSO, Acción Social and Boletín Médico-Social, closely followed ILO meetings and conferences, the travels of its functionaries, and the fate of its many resolutions during the 1930s.…”

“…Distinctive socioeconomic conditions and shared cultural roots meant that 'South America should take on the problem of nutrition with an American approach. ' The notion of a culturally distinctive Latin America faced with common social and public health problems was typical of the time, and evidence of a rising class of regional scientific experts resistant to longstanding European hegemony in their fields (Cueto & Palmer, 2015). But this project of Latin American identity formation took on new texture in a pair of articles Escudero wrote in 1940 for the Argentine magazine Viva Cien Años, which served as a popular forum for advice on healthy living.…”

“…One commonplace notion is that the idea of social medicine migrated to Latin America from Europe, passed down from pioneers like Rudolph Virchow, in the mid-1800s, via his intellectual progeny, through academic networks, into Latin American countries, starting with 'early adopters' like Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile (Cueto & Palmer, 2015;Waitzkin, 2011). Another school of thought points to the efforts of progressive international institutions, such as the League of Nations (LN) and the International Labour Organization (ILO), which helped foster more integrative analyses of population health problems in line with social medicine (Dubin, 1995;Weindling, 1995Weindling, , 2006.…”

Translating genomics: cancer genetics, public health and the making of the (de)molecularised body in Cuba and Brazil

“…Yet this dynamic is also relevant in the Brazilian context. The influence of the Brazilian Hygiene Movement in the early twentieth century, which advocated widespread public health interventions as a means of addressing Brazil's social problems (Lima, 2007) and the prominence and role of collective health from the late 1970s to the present (Cueto, Palmer, 2014), provide an important context for discussing why preventive public health is one of the vectors through which cancer genetics is being pursued in Brazil. The findings presented here suggest that the socio-historic specificity and dynamic contemporary articulation of social medicine in Cuba and Brazil shape the biomedicalised trajectories through which emerging fields of healthcare such as cancer genetics flow and in which they are unevenly constituted.…”