In spite of the recent surge in history of science in many Latin American countries, for most we still lack adequate accounts of the growth of science, or even individual disciplines. Cueto’s account of the institutionalization of science in twentieth-century Peru stands alongside Simon Schwartzman’s study of Brazil as a model of the genre. Although Cueto’s objective is to describe how a research-front discipline (high-altitude physiology) can develop in spite of an inadequate infrastructure, his contextualization of the problem is complete enough to provide an overview of modern Peruvian science. The first biomedical discipline to appear in any strength was bacteriology, which coalesced around Carrión’s disease, an epidemiological puzzler with two distinct sets of symptoms. Later the Rockefeller Foundation became interested in yellow fever and was so successful in eradicating it that, as Cueto demonstrates, local bacteriological research went into eclipse as a result.
The success of high-altitude physiology from the 1930s on was the result of a combination of positive factors, including the ability of Peruvian researchers to capitalize on their natural environment, to attract the financial backing of American foundations, to implant themselves in international networks of scientific communication, and to break free of the constrictions of academic medicine. In so doing, Cueto asserts, they converted themselves into specialized technicians and lost contact with the local culture, a standard critique of science and scientists made by dependency theorists. Yet Cueto shows that, given a positivist myth about the utility of science and a general, albeit unfocused, will to modernize, men and women of scientific competence will be able to exploit available niches and participate with distinction in international disciplinary networks.
