Casa de Oswaldo Cruz

Destaques da Biblioteca de História das Ciências e da Saúde

The conquest of malaria: Italy, 1900- 1962

SNOWDEN, Frank M. The conquest of malaria: Italy, 1900- 1962. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the outset of the twentieth century, malaria was Italy's major public health problem. It was the cause of low productivity, poverty, and economic backwardness, while it also stunted literacy, limited political participation, and undermined the army. In this book Frank Snowden recounts how Italy became the world center for the development of malariology as a medical discipline and launched the first national campaign to eradicate the disease. Snowden traces the early advances, the setbacks of world wars and Fascist dictatorship, and the final victory against malaria after World War II. He shows how the medical and teaching professions helped educate people in their own self-defense and in the process expanded trade unionism, women’s consciousness, and civil liberties. He also discusses the antimalarial effort under Mussolini's regime and reveals the shocking details of the German army's intentional release of malaria among Italian civilians-the first and only known example of bioterror in twentieth-century Europe. Comprehensive and enlightening, this history offers important lessons for today's global malaria emergency. (Au).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

McNEILL, J. R. Mosquito empires: ecology and war in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. (New approaches to the Americas).

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This book explores the links among ecology, disease, and international politics in the context of the Greater Caribbean - the landscapes lying between Surinam and the Chesapeake - in the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries. Ecological changes made these landscapes especially suitable for the mosquito vectors of yellow fever and malaria, helping these diseases to wreak systematic havoc among invading armies and would-be settlers. Because yellow fever confers immunity on survivors of the disease, and because malaria confers resistance, these diseases played partisan roles in the struggles for empire and revolution, consistently attacking some populations more severely than others. In particular, yellow fever and malaria attacked newcomers to the region, which helped keep the Spanish Empire Spanish in the face of predatory rivals in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the late eighteenth century and through the nineteenth century, these diseases helped revolutions succeed by decimating forces sent out from Europe to stop them. (Au.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

KASPER, Anne S; FERGUSON, Susan J. Breast cancer: society shapes an epidemic. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This book explores the social and political contexts of breast cancer and how this illness has become a social problem. This is not a book about breast cancer as a biological disease, its diagnosis and treatment, or the latest research on how to cure it. Instead, it is a book about how economics, politics, gender, social, class, and race-ethnicity have affected the science behind breast cancer research, spurred the growth of a breast cancer industry, generated media representations of the disease, and defined and influenced women's experiences with breast cancer. This book addresses the social construction of breast cancer as an illness and as an area of scientific controversy, advocacy, and public policy. Chapters on the history of breast cancer, the health care system, the environment, the marketing of breast cancer treatments, and the health advocacy movements, among others, reveal the complex social forces that have constructed our collective and individual responses to breast cancer. (Au.)

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

HORNE, Gerald. O sul mais distante: o Brasil, os Estados Unidos e o tráfico de escravos africanos. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2010.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  
 

Neste livro original e perturbador; descortinam-se as profundas relações políticas e econômicas dos dois grandes impérios escravistas do século XIX. Baseado em uma vasta pesquisa realizada em diversos arquivos norte-americanos, brasileiros, britânicos e espanhóis, Gerald Horne explora as percepções que os ideólogos da escravidão no Sul dos Estados Unidos tinham do Brasil, os projetos que delinearam a partir delas, seu papel nas polêmicas seccionais que conduziram, em 1861, à eclosão da Guerra Civil e o impacto do conflito norte-americano sobre os destinos da escravidão brasileira. Diante da aguda pressão antiescravista britânica e da crescente polarização entre os estados do Sul e os do Norte, políticos e diplomatas pró-escravistas da República norte-americana se esforçaram para construir uma aliança hemisférica com o Império do BrasiI. Suas ações, contudo, esbarraram nas reticências dos líderes brasileiros diante dos projetos sulistas de exploração da Amazônia e dos temores de um novo enfrentamento com a Grã-Bretanha após a grave crise diplomática e militar de 1850. O livro de Gerald Horne, além de conter implicações de relevo para o presente, abre perspectivas bastante promissoras para um novo entendimento da história do Brasil. Sua leitura indica as dificuldades para se compreender devidamente a trajetória de nossa sociedade escravista caso isolemos do quadro de análise as forças históricas mais amplas que moldaram os destinos da escravidão negra no hemisfério ocidental. (Au.).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JENSEN, Niklas Thode. For the health of the enslaved: slaves, medicine and power in the Danish West Indies, 1803- 1848. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum press, 2012.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With the abolition of the Danish slave trade in the early nineteenth century, slave health had become a central concern in the Danish West Indies. Plantation owners and colonial administrators were no longer able to replace a population decimated by high mortality rates with slaves from Africa. On this background, the author offers a comprehensive look at the health conditions of the enslaved workers and the health care policies initiated by planters and the colonial government. The investigations reveal that in a comparative Caribbean perspective, Danish West Indian health policies were often quite unique and efficient, but also that the health of the enslaved fueled an ongoing power struggle between planters, administrators, and the enslaved in the waning years of human bondage in the New World. (Au.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAVES-CARBALLO, E. The tropical world of Samuel Taylor Darling: parasites, pathology, and philanthropy. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2007.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Samuel Taylor Darling (1872-1925), one of the world's leading experts in tropical diseases in the early twentieth century, investigated malaria, hookworm, amebiasis and other tropical diseases in Panama, the Far East, South Africa, Brazil and the southern United States. As a pathologist, he performed more than 4,000 autopsies among employees of the Panama Canal Company who died between 1905 and 1914. This experience gave him a singular perspective on the anatomical pathology of tropical diseases. The results of his innovative work helped him to develop new concepts about diagnosis and treatment of malaria; amebic dysentery and intestinal parasitosis; tuberculosis; and other diseases common in tropical regions. Darling is also credited with discovering histoplasmosis. For his pioneering work he was named an honorary member of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Andrew Balfour, first Director of the Wellcome Laboratories in Khartoum, considered him "America's foremost tropical parasitologist and pathologist.” This first full-length biography of a remarkable scientist is essential reading for medical historians, and those interested in the history of sanitation and public health, malaria, and yellow fever. It provides a fuller understanding of the Panama Canal experience than hitherto, and discusses the Rockefeller philanthropy in tropical medicine and hygiene. (Au.).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RENNEVILLE, Marc. Crime et folie: Deux siècles d’enquêtes médicales et judiciaires. Paris: Fayard, 2003.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Le crime est-il une folie ? Autrement dit, celui qui commet um meurtre perd-il le contrôle de Iui-même ? Faut-il le mettre à l'asile ou en prison ? Et si le criminel est un malade, peut-on le guérir ? Comment détecter les criminels potentiels pour les empêcher de nuire ? Ces questions se posem chaque fois que resurgit un tueur en série ou dans le débat actuel sur Ia pédophilie, Elles ne sont pas nouvelles : de Ia théorie de la « bosse du crime», qui imprégnait les mentalités du XIX siècle, à celle du chromosome du crime, em passant par Lombroso, selon lequel le criminel est un sauvage égaré dans notre civilisation, médecins et psychiatres ont proposé depuis deux siècles de nombreuses réponses, faisant du criminel un « objet de science », Ce sont les grandes théories des criminologues qu'explique ce li vre, en rappelant les débats qu'elles ont suscites, aussi bien du côté des législateurs et des magistrats que dans l'opinion publique. (Au.).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PORTER, Roy. Bodies politic: disease, death and doctors in Britain, 1650-1900. London: Reaktion Books, 2001.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
  

In a historical tour de force, Roy Porter takes a critical look at representations of the body in death, disease and health and at images of the healing arts in Britain from the mid-seventeenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. Roy Porter's two key assumptions are, first, that the human body is the chief signifier and communicator of all manner of meanings - religious, moral, political and medical alike - and, second, that pre-scientific medicine was an art which depended heavily on performance, ritual, rhetoric and theatre. In a text at once robustly humorous and learned, Porter argues that great symbolic weight was attached to contrasting conceptions of the healthy and diseased body, and that such ideas were mapped onto antithetical notions of the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. With these images in mind, he explores aspects of being ill alongside the practice of a range of medical specialities, paying particular attention to self-presentations by physicians, surgeons, quacks and others and to changes in practitioners' public identities over time. Armed with a wealth of outrageous anecdotes and satirical imagery, Porter also discusses the wider metaphorical and symbolic meanings of disease and doctoring in Britain in the last 250 years. (Au).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HOLMES, Frederic L.; RENN, Jürgen; RHEINBERGER, Hans- Jörg (Ed.). Reworking the bench: research notebooks in the history of science. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishes, 2003. (Archimedes, 7).

 

 

 

 

 

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Research records composed of notes and protocols have long played a role in the efforts to understand the origins of what have come to be seen as the established milestones in the development of modem science. The use of research records to probe the nature of scientific investigation itself, however, is a recent development in the history of science. With Eduard Dijksterhuis, we could address them as a veritable "epistemological laboratory". The purpose of a workshop entitled Reworking the Bench: Laboratory Notebooks in the History of Science, held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, was to bring together historians who have been exploiting such resources, to compare the similarities and differences in the materials they had used and to measure the potential and scope for future explorations of "science in the making" based on such forms of documentation. The contributions which form this volume are based on papers presented at this workshop or written afterwards by participants in the discussions. This is the first book that addresses the issue of research notes for writing history of science in a comprehensive manner. Its case studies range from the early modern period to the present and cover a broad range of different disciplines.  (Au.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NASH, Linda. Inescapable ecologies: a history of environment, disease, and knowledge. Berkeley: University of California press, 2006.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
  

Among the most far-reaching effects of the modern environmental movement is the recognition that human beings are inescapably part of a larger ecosystem. With this book, Linda Nash gives us a wholly original and much longer history of ecological ideas of the body as that history unfolded in California's Central Valley. Taking us from nineteenth-century fears of miasmas and faith in wilderness cures to the recent era of chemical pollution and cancer clusters, Nash charts how Americans have connected their diseases to race and place as well as dirt and germs. Inescapable Ecologies brings critically important insights to the histories of environment, culture, and public health while offering a provocative commentary on the human relationship to the larger world. (Au).