April 2016
Marcos Cueto and Steven Palmer.
Medicine and Public Health in Latin America: A History, written by Marcos Cueto, scientific editor of HCSM, and Steven Palmer (University of Windsor, Canada) and member of our editorial council, won the 2017 George Rosen prize of The American Association for the History of Medicine.
Marcos Cueto received the award on behalf of Steve Palmer during the 90th annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine, that took place in Nashville, Tennessee, on May 4-6, 2017.
The prize is named after George Rosen, (1910–1977), a US physician and leader in social medicine. Rosen published important works in the history of medicine, and the sociological and cultural aspects of health including A History of Public Health (1958) and From Medical Police to Social Medicine (1974). He was one of the founders of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences and editor of the American Journal of Public Health.
Marcos Cueto at the ceremony of the awards of the American Association for the History of Medicine. May, 5, 2017, Nashville, Tennessee.
The award committee said: “We believe that the book will have a transformative effect on the historical understanding of public health in Latin America, and will establish a new template for the study of the global south more generally…. In particular, their foundational concepts ‘health in adversity’ and ‘culture of survival’ will stand as models for scholars in a variety of related fields”.
Palmer and Cueto also won the 2016 best book prize by the Health, Science, and Technology section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).
The book – launched in English by Cambridge University Press and in Portuguese by Editora Fiocruz – summarizes the social history of health in Latin America.
It begins with the contact between indigenous African American and European medicine and follows the Latin American changes in the first half of the twentieth century, in part due to the work of international agencies such as the Rockefeller Foundation.
The authors, then, present the region in the context of Cold War, when health programs were implemented with the expectation of eradicating diseases.
Read in HCSM:
Cueto, Marcos. La “cultura de la sobrevivencia” y la salud pública internacional en América Latina: la Guerra Fría y la erradicación de enfermedades a mediados del siglo XX. Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos, Mar 2015, vol.22, no.1, p.255-273. ISSN 0104-5970
Palmer, Steven. “O Demônio que se transformou em vermes”: a tradução da saúde pública no Caribe Britânico, 1914-1920. Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos, Set 2006, vol.13, no.3, p.571-589. ISSN 0104-5970
