Public Health in the Caribbean and Latin America: A past perspective
University of York, 18-20 July 2014
Diffusionist models of understanding the histories of medicine and health practices in nonEuropean countries have increasingly been discredited. Instead, scholars now highlight the
multi-directional movement of ideas and practices between Europe and other parts of the
world, as well as the mutually-constitutive character of imperialism, post-colonial ideologies
and development projects. Yet, several gaps remain in the historiography. Relatively scant
attention has been paid to the production of medical and scientific practices in Caribbean and
Latin American contexts, and how the underpinning knowledge was used to reshape the
design and implementation of medical, scientific and public health work; this dynamism in
Latin America and the Caribbean also had a far-reaching impact on imperial powers such as
Portugal, the US, France and, not least, Britain. This two-day workshop, centred around precirculated papers, tries to fill the gap in the scholarship by examining some of the unique
public health policies that emerged in the Caribbean and Latin America and which were
deeply wedded to local conditions and influenced by negotiations between indigenous elites
and the groups they sought to control. The workshop also seeks to better understand the ways
in which models of public health organisation and practices were exported wider afield, either
through trans-imperial networks or post-Second World War developmental strategies.
The workshop focusses on four themes:
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The control of tuberculosis
Questions of infant and maternal health
Primary health care, broadly defined
The use of the Caribbean and Latin America as a laboratory
And it engages with one or more of the following questions:
 The identification of tuberculosis as a public health problem and the measures
intended to combat the disease
 How TB control efforts were imagined, variously, as a national, regional and
international problem
 How international and multilateral agencies, such as the WHO and UNICEF, got
involved in TB control efforts
 Why was the issue of infant and maternal health advocated as being of national,
regional and international significance?
 What were the core components of infant and maternal healthcare services in different
imperial and national contexts?
 How were experiments with social medicine interconnected with a rise in ideologies
relating to the need for social security nets and universal health care?
 How were concepts of universal healthcare incorporated into political systems, both
imperial and national?
 What roles did international health organisations play in advocating the need for
primary health care?
 How were experiments in primary healthcare in Latin America and the Caribbean
exported wider afield?
 What efforts were made by global funding agencies, such as the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund, to reshape structures of primary healthcare?
 How did external pressures, from funding agencies and new political alliances, cause
an expansion of public-private partnerships in health-care delivery, and to what
effect?
The conference is being held in the York Medical Society in the city centre of York. For
directions, see http://www.yorkmedsoc.org/how-to-find-us.html
The preliminary conference programme is laid out on the following pages.
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Friday 18 July 2014 – York Medical Society, 23 Stonegate.
1:00- 1:15: registration
1:15 -1:45: Lunch
1:45-2:00: Welcome and introductions
2:00- 3:00: Primary Health Care I (Magali Sa)
1. Margaret Jones, ‘”Who pays for the sick poor?”: Poor relief and medical aid in
colonial Jamaica, 1886-1940’.
2. Beatrix Carillo Campos, ‘Chile and the USPSHS: Understanding US-Chilean
relations through public health’
3:00-3:30 Coffee break
3:30-4:30 Tuberculosis control I (Henrice Altink)
1. Pedro Welch, ‘Battling the Scourges: Public Health Provision in Barbados, 19001950’.
2. Debbie McCollin, Masson’s legacy: The development of TB treatment in Trinidad
and Tobago, 1905-1962.
4:30-5:15 break
5:15-6:15 – Professor Jamie Benchemol, ‘Stories from the history of health and science: a
sinuous tale composed against a backdrop of football and samba’
6:15-7:00 – Wine reception sponsored by the history department
7:30- Dinner at Melton’s Too, 25 Walmgate.
Saturday 19 July, York Medical Society, 23 Stonegate.
9:30-10:00 – Registration and coffee
10:00- 11:00: The Caribbean and Latin America as a Laboratory (Sabine Clarke)
1. Nicole Trujillo-Pagan, ‘How the Puerto Rican hookworm campaign reshaped the
relationship between medicine and race in the US South and beyond’.
2. Daniele Cozzoli, ‘Research on Curare in the 20th Century and the scientific
collaboration between Italy and South America’.
11:00-11:30 Coffee Break
11:30-12:30: Primary Health Care II (Sanjoy Bhattarchaya)
1. Ana Carolina de Carvalho Viotti, ‘The development of health care in the tropics:
Notes on the exchanged letters between Brazil and Portugal during the colonial
period’.
2. Tara Innis, ‘A perfect storm: public health and infectious disease in Barbados, 19001930’.
12:30-1:15 Lunch
1:15-2:15: Teaching the history of the production of medical and scientific practices in
Caribbean and Latin American context. A roundtable discussion led by Henrice Altink
and Magali Romero Sa.
2:15-3:15: Maternal and Child Welfare (Margaret Jones)
1. Diego Luza Fernandez, ‘Scientific debates, public policy and social movements at the
origin of the Vaso de Leche program in Lima, Peru (1980-1994).
2. Julianne Weis, ‘Cecily Williams, the WHO, and the first decades in the globalisation
of maternal and child health, 1948-1960’.
3:15-3:45 Coffee break
3:45- 4:45: Tuberculosis II (Magali Romero Sa)
1. Henrice Altink, ‘”Fight TB with BCG”: Mass vaccination campaigns in the British
Caribbean, 1951-56
2. Jhon Carmona, ‘ Tuberculosis control in Peru: a bad export?’
4:45-5:00 Conclusions.