Traditional histories of medicine used to be, and in large part still are, a territory cultivated by doctors interested in the past, who write biographies of famous physicians and effective treatments. Beyond their specific contributions, these histories appear to have attempted to reconstruct the “inevitable progress” generated by university-certified medicine, to unify the past of an increasingly specialized profession, and to emphasize a certain ethos and moral philosophy that is presented as distinctive, unaltered and emblematic of medical practice throughout time. In recent decades, however, a strong revisionist approach has been unveiling, and Latin American historiography is part of this trend. The emphasis now is on delving into the development of medicine as a more ambiguous and faltering process, looking at power, the politics of health, the impact of public health interventions, and representations of disease.
One of the topics of this renovated historiography is the making of the medical...
