Race, Place, and Medicine: The Idea of the Tropics in Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Medicine, and: The Spectacle of the Races: Scientists, Institutions, and the Race Question in Brazil, 1870-1930 (review)

Race, Place, and Medicine: The Idea of the Tropics in Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Medicine. By Julyan G. Peard. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. $54.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.)

The Spectacle of the Races: Scientists, Institutions, and the Race Question in Brazil, 1870–1930. By Lilia Moritz Schwarcz. Translated by Leland Guyer. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999. $35.00 cloth.)

Brazil's tropical climate and multiracial population have long sparked the interest of foreign and local observers, as organizers and spectators of the annual Carnival celebration well know. For nineteenth-century European thinkers, however, both factors spelled certain failure for Brazil's prospects of constructing a modern, "civilized" nation. The distinctly "miasmatic" atmosphere of the tropics was deemed insalubrious, if not fatal, for whites, while racial mixture was viewed as both indicative and determinative of sociocultural degeneracy. Such "scientific" diagnoses were a bitter pill to swallow for Brazilians as they endeavored to stitch together a nation from a patchwork of regionally scattered and multiethnic communities. Brazilian responses to such racial and geographic determinist theories lie at the heart of two fine new monographs that explore the nexus between science, race, and nation-building.

Building on the earlier work of scholars such as Nancy Leys Stepan, Thomas Skidmore, and Dante Moreira Leite, both Julyan G. Peard and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz explore how scientific and medical discourse was adapted, recast, and harnessed by Brazilians in their nation-building project. While the chronological focus and research methodology of the two monographs differ, each wrestles with the implication of the ascendancy of scientific discourse and professionalism in Brazil, tensions between regionalism and nationalism, and the exchange of cultural ideas between the North and South Atlantic.

Peard's Race, Place, and Medicine: The Idea of the Tropics in Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Medicine offers a highly revealing study of the pathbreaking research and social activism of the nineteenth-century Tropicalista doctors, a close-knit and committed group of physicians in Salvador, Bahia, whose work challenged both European theorists of tropical degeneracy and their sycophants in Brazil's established medical community. The Tropicalistas, whose members included Brazilian and foreign-born physicians resident in Brazil, conducted original research on disorders of primary interest to Brazilians by utilizing the latest European (German) advances in hematology, physiology, animal experimentation, and microscopy. The Bahian physicians' applied research aimed at pinpointing specific social factors that impinge on tropical disease, contesting the deterministic ideas of climate or race underpinning European environmentalist theories of tropical pathology. Thus, for example, the Tropicalistas denounced the unhealthiness and squalor of the slave regimen rather than the dissolute character of African slaves as a source of national weakness. As Peard succinctly states, while Europeans stressed degeneration, Tropicalistas emphasized regeneration, maintaining steadfast belief in the possibility of human improvement through environmental melioration, social reform, and physical education. Composed of many prominent mulattos, the Tropicalistas undoubtedly viewed theories of innate or irreversible racial degeneracy as more than a theoretical challenge for Brazilian nation-building.

The Tropicalistas' Gazeta Médica da Bahia, inaugurated in the 1860s, soon became both a nationally and internationally respected medical journal for its important research on Brazilian pharmacopoeia and diseases, such as hookworm, beriberi, filariasis, and ainhum; the journal also served as a proponent of state intervention in questions of sanitation, hygiene, and social welfare. Such public health advocacy, Peard points out, was extremely forward looking for its time and, sadly, short-lived. By the end of the century, the rise of bacteriology, "tropical medicine," and social Darwinism among the North Atlantic powers and their admirers in Brazil crowded out socioeconomic critiques with "clinical" diagnoses of disease etiology that stigmatized those who were poor and nonwhite.

In highlighting the originality and progressivism of the...