Salud, cultura y sociedad en América Latina

Recent years have seen a rapid growth of interest in the history of tropical medicine, sparked by a number of academic and political developments. Imperialism is back on the scholarly agenda, leading us to ask how important empire was to science and medicine, and vice versa. Post-colonial studies raise questions about how the colonies were critical to the constitution or genealogy of science and medicine in the metropolitan centres. Contemporary problems also play a part. The persistence of diseases like malaria, the return of "old" diseases once believed almost conquered, such as cholera, as well as the eruption of deadly new ones, like the Ebola virus, lead us to consider the political geography and economy of disease, as well as styles of tropical medicine. Cholera and malaria were, of course, once familiar diseases in Europe, yet by the early twentieth century had been re-designated as essentially "tropical" diseases, a shift in definition which makes us ask: what is tropical about tropical diseases?