A Global History of Medicine by Mark Jackson

Author:Mark Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780192524690
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

By the 1990s, political conditions throughout the region had stabilized, but economic woes persisted. Many countries that once had near-universal health systems now had partially or largely privatized health insurance, which drastically reduced access to services. The simplistic health transition theory—postulating a shift from infectious to chronic diseases as countries developed—was clearly disproven in Latin America, with soaring rates of both infectious and chronic diseases. In many settings, under-nutrition was resolved through the industrialization of cheap, energy-dense foods, with negative effects for small-scale farmers and a drastic impact on diabetes, now the leading cause of death in Mexico.

Yet certain developments, already present in previous eras, suggest that despite (or perhaps because of) global attention to terrorism and the ‘clash of civilizations’, the region is on more solid footing in health and medical terms. In addition to greater political (and in some places economic) stability, this at least partially stems from both an unprecedented decline in foreign interference in the region and an increase in collaboration across Latin America. One such effort is Cuba’s Latin American School of Medicine (Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina), founded in 1999 to train thousands of doctors from impoverished backgrounds from throughout the Americas and beyond who return home to serve their communities.48 The Union of South American Nations, or UNASUR, was established in 2008 with the aim of fostering economic integration and within-region development aid. South-to-South cooperation, both within and beyond the region, is now a political priority in Brazil. Moreover, the elections in recent years of progressive governments at the local and national level in Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Honduras, Bolivia, and Ecuador, and other settings (some since elected out of office or deposed), variously led by doctors in the social medicine tradition, have resulted in renewed efforts at universal social and health policies, and even ‘interculturalism’, integrating traditional and Western medicine.

As evidenced by the issues touched upon here, the historiography of Latin American medicine and health is complex in geographic, cultural, social, and political terms. While stunted for a long time, the field has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years, making it one of the world’s most dynamic history of medicine literatures.49 Linking contemporary health policy and global health concerns to the writing of history poses certain challenges. Balancing local and national developments with regional and international influences and trends—clearly necessary for comprehensive analysis—is a near conceptual, archival, and temporal nightmare. Should each global health campaign be studied in each setting or can certain trends be generalized from a set of experiences? Comparative work is de rigeur but either deteriorates into superficiality or requires several lifetimes or even a (convenient) marriage of researchers. Establishing an equilibrium among works that rescue local scientific traditions, explore the ‘cultures of health’, address the making of medical and health policies, and track the trajectories of health personnel is no mean feat. Getting to know the past, inevitably, is a reflection of the present. Given the exciting, if often terribly destructive, politics of Latin America, its medical and health historiography is poised to be among the world’s most engaging.

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