Throughout Latin America, social medicine has been widely recognized for its critical perspectives on mainstream understandings of health and for its progressive policy achievements. Nevertheless, it has been an elusive subject: hard to define, with puzzling historical discontinuities and misconceptions about its origins. Drawing on a vast archive and with an ambitious narrative scope that transcends national borders, Eric D. Carter offers the first comprehensive intellectual and political history of the social medicine movement in Latin America, from the early twentieth century to the present day. While maintaining a consistent focus on health equity, social medicine has evolved with changing conditions in the region. Carter shows how it shaped early Latin American welfare states, declined with the dominance of midcentury technocratic health planning, resurged in the 1970s in solidarity against authoritarian regimes, and later resisted neoliberal reforms of the health sector. He centers socialist and anarchist doctors, political exiles, intellectuals, populist leaders, and rebellious technocrats from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and other countries who responded to and shaped a dynamic political environment around health equity. The lessons from this history will inform new thinking about how to achieve health equity in the twenty-first century.
Eric D. Carter is Edens Professor of Geography and Global Health at Macalester College.
"A densely packed journey through the ideologies, personalities, politics and health systems which generated the category of social medicine. Teeming with essential references and covering nearly a century of Central and South American involvement in the field, Carter demonstrates how the idea of social medicine waxed and waned with the political forces of its day (welfare states, central planning, authoritarianism and neoliberal reform) while never losing sight of the charismatic individuals who brought its central precepts to life."--Social History of Medicine "Carter succeeds with this ambitious history of social medicine in Latin America."--Hispanic American Historical Review "The author masterfully selected the key nodes and threads to expose the transformations of social medicine during the twentieth century spearheaded by Latin American intellectuals and politicians. Historians will find the hemispheric scope with a postcolonial perspective focused on Latin American international networks fresh and innovative; this is an overdue study, complementing previous work on Pan-American health . . . Carter has unpacked a new set of academic and political connections and dynamics that will open new, productive, and innovative research avenues."--H-Sci-Med-Tech "This work will enrich readers' understanding of social medicine's complex history and its importance in Latin America."--CHOICE
