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  • Chagas Disease: History of a Continent’s Scourge by François Delaporte, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer
  • Mónica García
François Delaporte. Chagas Disease: History of a Continent’s Scourge. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. N.Y.: Fordham University Press, 2012. x + 180 pp. $26.00 (paperbound, 978-0-8232-4250-4), $90.00 (cloth, 978-0-8232-4249-8).

Delaporte’s book, originally published in French in 1999,1 introduces to the English-speaking scholars the historiographical debate about the way in which Chagas disease, also known as American trypanosomiasis, was established as a distinct malady. Historians had claimed that the Brazilian Carlos Chagas, physician and researcher of the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz of Rio de Janeiro, discovered the ailment in 1909 (the blood-sucking insects, the triatomine bugs, the parasite—the Trypanosome cruzy—and the disease). Delaporte argues that this was not the case. First, he points out that Chagas’s early work was concerned not with a disease but with a parasite he found by accident. Chagas would have linked this parasite to an experimental infection, then found it in a domestic insect, and then assumed it to be the cause of an unknown disease. Most important, Delaporte claims, what Chagas was studying was not the American trypanosomiasis as we know it but a parasitic thyroiditis: he was after an endocrine disorder, the goiter and cretinism prevalent in Minais Gerais. Delaporte affirms that it was not until 1935, when the Argentinean physician Cecilio Romaña described the pathognomonic sign of the disease, that is, the unilateral palpebral edema, that the American trypanosomiasis was identified in its nosological singularity. This sign made it possible to consider the disease as a parasitic pathology as opposed to an endocrine disorder. Romaña, by turning back to laboratory medicine and by working in rural Argentina where the disease was present without other pathologies that might mask it, was able to make the first diagnosis of the actual disease, and hence to identify it as a continental scourge, according to Delaporte.

In the task of clarifying the “actual series of events leading up to the discovery of Chagas disease” (p. 12), Delaporte constantly reverses not only Chagas’s accounts, but also the testimonies of his contemporaries and historians about [End Page 397] the order and “logic” of such a discovery. He denounces mainly Brazilian historians who had taken Chagas’s accounts at face value. Since the original edition of Delaporte’s book was released in 1999, other historians have also tackled the issue of the discovery of Chagas disease but from a different perspective.2 They have focused not on the epistemological turns that Delaporte painstakingly traces back, but on the collective process of creating a scientific consensus. This would have involved the establishment of the disease both as a scientific and as a social fact. On the basis of this new historiography, the process would have indeed been initiated with Chagas—who, those historians insist, discovered the disease—but would have only consolidated itself around 1940 or the 1950s, depending on the historians’ standpoint. These historians accuse Delaporte of anachronism or of taking current knowledge as a yardstick to measure the past.

Interestingly, Delaporte makes the very same criticism to the social studies of knowledge in which the aforementioned critics could be cast out. In his view, those who establish causal linkages between the “context of knowledge” (p. 11) and scientific knowledge undertake an ahistorical task since they take for granted self-evident objects (laboratories where science is supposed to be done, or science as a social institution, or scientific controversies, or the interaction of the social with the cognitive). According to Delaporte, these kinds of objects obscure the never foreordained historicity of what men do in order to be able to speak about things. Delaporte does not ignore the institutional settings that allowed physicians to encounter the bug associated to Chagas disease (medical training at the Institute Oswaldo Cruz, the consolidation of a research program on parasitology, and the medicalization of Brazilian population via public health expeditions). Indeed, he argues that such settings were crucial in defining the conditions under which apprehending new biological objects became possible. However, Delaporte...

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