Sickness in the historiography of modern Latin America

Abstract

In the last two decades the topic of sickness has begun to gain a prominent place in Latin American historiography. Its growth as a subfield is part of the current fragmentation of historical studies - now much more prolific in thematic cuts than in ambitious and comprehensive narratives - and also of questions and approaches that the social sciences and humanities have highlighted among their concerns. This ostensible presence of disease as an object of reflection has been, and continues to be, the result of contributions originating in different work agendas. First, efforts to renew the traditional history of medicine. Then, the dissemination of interpretative models coming from other disciplines that, in various ways, found a problematic knot in disease. Finally, historical studies of the population and its material conditions of existence.