Diseases are “social constructions” (p. 2), editor Diego Armus says, “the biomedical . . . shaped as much by human subjectivity as by objective facts” (p. 6). The case studies in this collection proceed from this outlook, focusing on what some people have said and thought about various diseases in Latin American history.
Nancy Stepan explores the antimalaria campaigns in early-twentieth-century Bra-zil to consider why health officials take a keen interest in certain diseases at particular moments in history, while ignoring others. Stepan demonstrates that Brazil’s first efforts to study and control malaria followed the emergence of the Amazonian rubber export economy in the early 1900s. When this economic boom ended, so too did any real interest in combating malaria in Brazil, at least for the time. Stepan does an excellent job setting this story into its proper context, laying out the harsh medical reality of malaria and explaining how...
