In June 1991, in anticipation of the Columbian Year, the American History of Science Society met jointly in Madrid with the Spanish and Latin American societies to explore the multifaceted relationship between science and discovery. The book reviewed here arranges the papers of that meeting into five sections: Perspectives on the New World, mainly on cosmographic and geographic topics; Colonial Elites in the Enlightenment, with a number of fascinating accounts of the impact of Newton and Linnaeus in the Spanish colonies; Formation of National Scientific Communities, which includes some pathbreaking institutional and disciplinary studies of recent Latin American science (e.g., genetics in Brazil, astronomy in Chile); Nature, Health, and Urban Culture, a set of 11 articles on public health and tropical medicine; and World Dynamics of Science.
The last articles are particularly important because their focal point is a reconsideration of George Basalla’s venerable model of the spread of Western science, which had a tremendous impact on the history of science in Latin America in its formative years. Basalla and others review the model’s fortune; they are followed by a discussion of Latin American science in the context of the center-periphery model promoted by dependency theory, yielding a general consensus that the notion of “peripheral” science has not been very helpful in the evaluation of the region’s scientific history. Here the leading voice of critical analysis is Hebe Vessuri, one of the architects of the historiography of “peripheral” science.
The articles in this volume (about half of which are in English) are all easily accessible to the nonspecialist and provide a compelling introduction to the new history of science and medicine in Latin America, in which science is viewed in its broader social and cultural context.
