History of Medicine & Public Health in Latin America

Catalog description

In this course, we explore Latin America's fascinating history of medicine and public health - from the colonial encounter of indigenous, African and European healing practices to the unique ways in which Latin American nations faced the greatest public health challenges of the 20th century. The course explores a variety of subjects beginning in the early colonial era: African healing in the Americas, the evolution of tropical medicine, international public health missions, midwifery and the rise of obstetrics, funerary practices, miasma theory, and disease epidemics ranging from malaria to the HIV/AIDS crisis. We will focus heavily on how both patients and practitioners of alternative forms of healing reacted to treatments, sometimes with resistance, and in turn shaped the very nature of medicine in the region. The course approaches the history of medicine from a transnational perspective, seeing how practitioners and researchers in Latin America interacted with the global scientific community.