Healers, Healing, and Child Well-being: Ideologies, Institutions, and Health in Latin America and the Caribbean

From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism: Doctors, Healers, and Public Power In Costa Rica, 1800-1940. By Steven Palmer. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Pp. 329. $69.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.)

Race, Place, And Medicine: The Idea of the Tropics in Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Medicine. By Julyan G. Peard. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Pp. 315. N.p.)

The Tale Of Healer Miguel Perdomo Neira: Medicine, Ideologies, And Power in yhe Nineteenth-Century Andes. By David Sowell. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2001. Pp. 171. $55.00 cloth, $19.00 paper.)

Healing Cultures: Art snd Religion ss Curative Practices in the Caribbean snd its Diaspora. Edited by Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. (New York: Palgrave, 2001. Pp. 236. $45.00 cloth.)

The Child in Latin America: Health, Development, and Rights. Edited by Ernest J. Bartell and Alejandro O'Donnell. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. Pp. 378. $50.00 cloth, $22.50 paper.)

Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society. Edited by Tobias Hecht. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Pp. 277. $45.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.)

As scholars from a wide range of disciplines are increasingly discovering, Latin America and the Caribbean provide rich and complex venues in which to examine the worlds of sickness, healing, and healers. Virtually every setting in the region can point to a growing bibliography on themes, including the protean but growing state role in regulating the public's health; the social cleavages and mutual values revealed during particular epidemics; medical professionalization and the emergence of healing hierarchies; and the political and ideological shaping of medicine, both domestically and internationally. The blossoming of work in this area stems from a variety of factors, ranging from institutional developments—such as the marvelous research and teaching resources at the Casa Oswaldo Cruz in Rio de Janeiro—to the establishment of specialized journals and networks of scholars, to contemporary political concerns about the breakdown of social policies and the deterioration of health conditions across the region, to theoretical and conceptual trends relating to contact and conflict among different healing cultures.

The books reviewed in this essay cover several of the most dynamic themes in this literature: the complicated relationship among physicians, competing medical ideologies, and the state; the historic and contemporary vibrancy and demand for a wide array of healers and healing systems; and the health and social conditions of children, past and present.

In a previous LARR review essay on this field of inquiry (34, no.3, 1999), Ann Zulawski pointed out that the new generation of scholars of medicine and society in Latin America had invariably rejected an older belief in the enlightened diffusion and progress of Western ideas and practices in the Americas. By aiming their critique at the rise of medical hegemony, however, some of the studies of the 1990s unwittingly repeated the unidirectional diffusion narrative but interpreted it as a form of social control and professional self-interest. In a matter of just a few years, a more finely hued tableau has been painted of places and periods of medical syncretism, of fierce rivalries, and of the coexistence—sometimes uneasy, sometimes happy—of a range of healing cultures.

Steven Palmer's From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism: Doctors, Healers, and Public Power in Costa Rica, 1800-1940 is among the finest of these new histories of medical and health institutionalization in Latin America. Beautifully written and drawing from an impressive range of archival sources, journals and newspapers, legal proceedings, and personal reports, he traces the intersecting trajectories of herbalists, empirics, midwives, pharmacists, several grades of doctors, and other healers from colonial times to the launching of Costa Rica's modern exemplar of rapid public health advancement.

Palmer's overarching argument is that—although Costa Rica exhibited most of...