Health and medicine in Latin America: historical perspectives on the Cold War

BIRN, Anne-Emanuelle; NECOCHEA LÓPEZ, Raúl (editors). Peripheral nerve: health and medicine in Cold War Latin America. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. 376p. Contributors: Cheasty Anderson, Anne-Emanuelle Birn, Katherine E. Bliss, Gilberto Hochman, Jennifer L. Lambe, Nicole Pacino, Carlos Henrique Assunção Paiva, Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney, Raúl Necochea López, Marco A. Ramos, Gabriela Soto Laveaga

Buenos Aires psychoanalysts resisting imperialism. Brazilian parasitologists embracing  communism as an antidote to rural misery. Nicaraguan revolutionaries welcoming Cuban health cooperation. Chilean public health reformers gauging domestic approaches against their Soviet and Western counterparts.

As explored in Peripheral Nerve, these and accompanying accounts problematize existing understandings of how the Cold War unfolded in Latin America generally and in the health and medical realms more specifically.

Edited by Anne-Emanuelle Birn and Raúl Necochea López, Peripheral Nerve highlights how Latin American health professionals accepted, rejected, and adapted foreign involvement; manipulated the rivalry between the United States and the USSR; and forged local variants that they projected internationally. In so doing, this collection reveals the multivalent nature of Latin American health politics, offering a significant contribution to Cold War history.

Bringing together scholars from across the Americas, this book chronicles the experiences of Latin American physicians, nurses, medical scientists, and reformers who interacted with dominant U.S. and European players and sought alternative channels of health and medical solidarity with the Soviet Union and via South-South cooperation.

According to Mariola Espinosa, Associate Professor of History at University of Iowa, the book present a different way to look at the Cold War era in Latin America, with a more nuanced view of how different people in different places experienced, reacted to, and acted during the Cold War.

This book demonstrates that people in Latin America had the “nerve” to face international pressures and make choices that, while under the veil of the Cold War dichotomy, had more to do with the individual local realities than the larger battle between First and Second Worlds. To learn how Latin Americans dealt with the Cold War on a local and international level this book is essential,” writes Mariola.