Medicine and Public Health in Latin America
A History

This book provides a clear, broad, and provocative synthesis of the history of Latin American medicine.

Marcos Cueto (Author), Steven Palmer (Author)

9781107023673, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 December 2014

318 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.5 cm, 0.54 kg

'In their new coauthored work, Medicine and Public Health in Latin America, historians Marcos Cueto and Steven Palmer build on the flourishing scholarship on Latin American and Caribbean public health and medicine by offering a comprehensive synthesis extending from the pre-Columbian era to contemporary challenges with AIDS, cholera, and neoliberal responses to health care. Fundamentally, Cueto and Palmer underscore the role Latin American and Caribbean public health officials, scientists, and health institutions played in forging modern nation-states and constructing a citizenry.' Heather L. McCrea, Isis

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.

1. Indigenous medicine, official health, and medical pluralism
2. National medicines and sanitarian states
3. Making national and international health
4. Medical innovation in the twentieth century
5. Primary health care, neoliberal response, and global health in Latin America
6. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: History of medicine [MBX], History of the Americas [HBJK], History [HB]