Badhl al-ma`un fi fadl al-ta`un

resisted the Foundation ethos stressing full-time research activity, from a fear that salaries would be eroded by high levels of inflation. Across the continent, politicians and public opinion demanded more doctors rather than the fewer and more scientifically trained doctors proposed by the Foundation. In Argentina during the late 1940s and early 1950s the Foundation gradually withdrew its support from the Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Bernardo Houssay and his associates, because the first two Peronist regimes were virulently anti-American and relentlessly hostile to "elite" science. In post-1945 Peru Rockefeller-trained researchers displayed good technique, but, showing little flexibility in their work, made a false association between original research and the possession of modem equipment. This precipitated a decline in physiological research and a shift of Foundation interest from medicine to agriculture. The book contains illuminating examples of the over-confidence of "Rockefeller doctors" in their own science. For two decades they failed to recognize what Brazilian physicians familiar with yellow fever had long suspected: that Afro-Brazilians tended to display yellow fever symptoms in milder forms than Brazilian whites. This reviewer has one reservation about the book. Most of the authors have insufficient command of the broader socioeconomic and political historiography, so that fascinating data are not always contextualized persuasively. The volume is flawed by a failure to grapple directly with the significance of the crises of the World Depression and the Second World War, which did much to undermine cherished "progressive" assumptions of a harmonious linear progress within a capitalist framework that Rockefeller officials shared with their Latin American allies. How far did these crises deflect Foundation officials from their earlier objectives? And how far did a contraction in both national and philanthropic financing of projects sap confidence in international cooperative activities? The book suggests many fruitful lines of inquiry. Comparative study of the role of foreign missions, amongst which the Foundation was probably unique in having an enduring institutional presence, is important. There is much more to say about interactions between the "scientific community" in the United States and its impoverished, embryonic counterparts in Latin America. The character of the French influences in medical education and practice which were routinely criticized by Foundation employees as insufficiently rooted in experimental science has received only recent attention by scholars. And the links of "scientific politics", proclaimed by positivists in Mexico, Brazil and elsewhere, with "scientific philanthropy" and "scientific racism" merit clarification. Not all innovation …