I. The Influence of Slavery on Ethnic and Racial Relations
Throughout the history of Latin America there has been a drastic differentiation between the treatment of peoples of different races, classes, and political affiliations. This portion of this web site is aimed at pointing out several forms of prejudices that have affected the development of science throughout the history of Latin America.
To gain a better understanding of the berated status of people of color in Latin America it is important to first summarize how these people got to be known as racial degenerates, second class, citizens, and became socially stigmatized in Latin America and other parts of the world. Most of the cultural diversity that exist in Latin America today is a by-product of slavery that existed in Latin America and throughout Europe and other parts of the world several generations ago. Some of the rationalization for the existence of slavery contained themes that have been prevalent throughout this course "History, Technology and Medicine in Latin America."
The following is a brief history of the slave trade that was tragic but yet served to diversify the world and especially Latin America which has such a wide variety of races and cultures. (The summary has been edited and is available at the following web site in a more elaborate format) http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/timelines/htimeline3.htm.) All this taken together has resulted in a rainbow people that have for the most part learned to see their differences in a positive light.
The height of The Atlantic Slave Trade began in the 18h century. Historians have estimated that between 1650 and 1900 at least 28 million Africans were compulsorily removed from Central and Western Africa as slaves (but the numbers involved are controversial).
This was a human catastrophe for Africa and for humanity, the world African Slave Trade was truly a "Holocaust" which resulted in the senseless killings of hundreds of people. Muslim traders exported as many as 17 million slaves to the coast of the Indian Ocean, to the Middle East, and to North Africa. African slaves were exported through the Red Sea, the trans-Sahara, and the East Africa/Indian Ocean to other parts of the world. Between the 1500's and the 1900's it has been approximated that at least 5 million Africans were put into bondage.
In what has been known as the "Middle Passage," between 1450 and 1850, at least 12 million Africans were shipped from Africa across the Atlantic Ocean. They were primarily shipped to colonies in North America, South America, and the West Indies. Of the Africans that were kidnapped 80% (or at least 7 million) were exported during the 18th century. As many as 10-20% of them died on the ships enroute for the Americas. Unknown numbers (probably at least 4 million) of Africans died in slave wars and forced marches before being shipped. Within central Africa itself, the slave trade precipitated migrations: coastal tribes fled slave-raiding parties and captured slaves were redistributed to different regions in Africa.
African slave trade and slave labor transformed the world. In Latin America and the United States slavery provided for free labor, which raised the capital of goods such as cotton, cattle, and tobacco among other things. In Africa, slave trade stimulated the expansion of powerful West African kingdoms. In the Islamic world, African slave labor on plantations, in seaports, and within families expanded the commerce and trade of the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. In the Americas, slave labor became the key component in trans-Atlantic agriculture and commerce supporting the booming capitalist economy of the 17th and 18th centuries, with the greatest demand in the Americas coming from Brazil and the sugar plantations of the Caribbean.
Queen Nzingha of Angola and King Maremba of the Congo, fought valiantly, if vainly, against the European slavers and their African collaborators. Image of Queen Mother Nana Yaa Asantewa [18??-1921?] , who "rallied the Asante against the British in 1900; the Anglo-Asante war of that year is named after her" (The Encyclopaedia Africana Project [EAP], Ghana, West Africa): http://www.endarkenment.com/eap/
Others resisted their captors by any means necessary even jumping overboard from slave ships during the horrendous "Middle Passage" across the Atlantic Ocean. Enslaved Africans that were destined for the Americas would be subject to a "breaking in" process. This process often took place in the West Indies. This process was designed to take away any feelings of self government and independence that the slaves might have had. Many resisted having their spirits broken and managed to escape, eventually forming independent communities such as that of the Maroons in the West Indies. Some of these Maroon communities numbered in the 1000s in South American and the Caribbean. Slaves often waged warfare against slave hunters, if they were caught for rebelling they faced an almost certain death, if not a brutal one to set an example for prospective followers.
The forced and brutal dispersal of millions of Africans into foreign lands created the "Black Diaspora." African slaves and their descendants carried skills and communitarian values, rich cultural traditions, resiliency, and resistance ethos that transformed and enriched the cultures they entered around the world.
Thus, as African peoples are globally dispersed, they carried their traditions of cultural creativity and oral arts with them, such as "common musical rhythms, exploration of multicolors…and diverse textures, play on repetition, and call-and-response modes of verbal activity" African folktales, often featuring the tortoise, hare, and spider, are widespread on the African continent and were carried from Africa to the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States.
Most of the earliest black immigrants to the Americas were natives of Spain and Portugal. Between 1502 and 1518 Spain shipped hundreds of Spanish-born Africans overseas to work as laborers, especially in mines. By the 1530s the Portuguese were also using African slaves in Brazil. From then until the abolition of the slave trade in 1870, at least 10 million Africans were forcibly brought to the Americas. Most of these slaves worked on plantations producing sugar, coffee, cotton, tobacco, and rice in northeastern Brazil and in the Caribbean islands.
Today, their descendants form significant ethnic minorities in the United States and several Latin American countries, and they are the dominant element in many of the Caribbean nations.
Latin American society was and to a certain extent is still generally subdivided into classes. At the top were the Europeans, in the middle were the free nonwhites, and at the bottom were slaves and Native Americans. This hierachization of people often arose from the rationale that helped to justify slavery which included theories that made Blacks and lesser extent other people of color that resembled them inferior, subhuman, animalistic, savages, uncultured, and lacking normal intellectual functions.
Africans filled occupational roles in towns and cities, although they tended to be concentrated in the more menial and unskilled tasks. The majority of the black population in Latin America and the Caribbean spent their lives in domestic service or as agricultural laborers. For further elaboration of this topic visit the place of origin of these historical accounts: http://encarta.msn.com/find/Concise.asp?ti=025F2000
II. Race Relations Leads to a Redefinition of the Indian Race
One of the major ideas that have influenced and sparked research in science is the scientific explanation of the Andean people who after centuries of residing in the Andean mountains had become acclimatized to the low oxygen pressures of high altitudes. The first scientific explanation was derived from French and British researchers who began investigating in the highlands of Mexico and Peru and had concluded that the native Indians were an inferior race of people because physiological functions was impossible at altitudes were there existed little oxygen.
One of the major contributors to the development of the field of Andean biology was Carlos Monge who set out to disprove that the Andean people were a sub-human race of people. He organized an expedition to the highlands to confirm that the Andean people had indeed adapted a mechanism that allowed them to survive throughout the years. The Institute of Andean Biology became dedicated to this field in Peru.
When the first experiments were performed by Francois-Gilbert Vialt in Mexico he concluded that "the Mexicans were an anemic race because the lack of oxygen at higher altitudes kept them in a permanent weakened state." This led to further research by scientists such as Paul Bert who observed the increased number of red blood cells in persons who climb at or live at high altitudes. Joseph Barcroft a prestigious physiologist from Cambridge also organized an expedition to the Andes and found that oxygen pressures of peoples at high altitudes was considerably lower than in dwellers at sea level. He later published the results of his study and concluded, "All dwellers at high altitudes are persons of impaired physical and mental powers."
Conclusions such as these led to the directly to Peruvian involvement and sparked intense opposition from scientists such as Carlos Monge Medrano. Medrano has stated that after reading thesis from other scientists that believed that "man at high altitudes is physically and mentally deficient compared to other men" inspired him to originate a thesis of his own. His work aimed at emphasizing the exceptional performance, especially physical performance of native Indians that have adapted for centuries to the high altitude environment. Monge's study led to him coining a term that was used to refer to the loss of acclimatization to as "disease of the Andes" or "chronic mountain disease, which later became known as Monge's disease.
In 1934 Carlos Medrano was nominated director of the Institute of Andean Biology. He thought that the error that earlier physiologists had made had been to wrongly hold life at sea level as the standard for normality. When in reality there are a countless number of organisms that exist well above sea level. He considered the Andean people to be "the race with the greatest physical performance in the world." This led to the redefining and the reorienting of the position of the Indian status in Peru. There arose a sense of "indigenismo" or a pride in the Indian culture. This line of thought is thought to have had produced a "rupture in the country's life, and its influence extended to medical and scientific circles."
A summary of "Andean Biology in Peru: Scientific Lifestyles on the Periphery" by Marcos Cueto
http://www.ddg.com/LIS/aurelia/titpag.htm
http://www.ddg.com/LIS/aurelia/peru.htm
Chile
III. Race Relations and the Views of the Origins of Health in Chile
The 1800's in Chile are characterized as fragmented and often filled with social tension prior to the Revolution of 1891. There existed in Chile a centralization of power that often denied people of all classes their most basic rights like were to study and even extremes such as were to bury their dead. Extreme measures such as these were often used under the pretense of improving public health in Chile. Even Elite status was no guarantee of freedom from interference from the state in people's intimate matters. However the working class and the poor were often singled out as the cause of infectious disease. The upper class elite where thought of as being morally superior which prevented them from being vulnerable to infectious disease such as outbreaks of cholera, yellow fever, and malaria.
Public health was considered to be poor in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. A great percentage of the population lost their lives to smallpox, cholera, and other infectious diseases. The infant mortality rate was as high as 33.8 per cent and the life expectancy was as low as 30-32 years. Although these statistics can be applied the population regardless or class and race. The president at the time Balmaceda gave regional groups or regional laws known as juntas the right to divide departmental territory into medical jurisdictions believed convenient to facilitate the duties of inspections and enforcement. These divisions were comprised of a doctor a governmental inspector and two members of the local communities,
"vecinos." These groups subjected all public and private establishments to weekly inspections to insure adherence to the sanitary laws.
The government, however, targeted certain districts for a more direct application of public health policy. The working class neighborhoods were directly singled out as sites for public health concerns. The political structure that existed in Chile deserves some attention, perhaps most profoundly because the upper class although there were not directly screened out for special attention they were also unable to put up resistance against these policies. State regulation was so extensive that the entire medical profession and their activities were regulated. Te state even exercised control over selective entrance to the medical schools. It seemed as though even an education did not guarantee loyalty to the state. The political regime implementations of laws that denied people their most basic rights served to further fragment the elite of Chile. The central bureaucracy aim was to maintain strict control over the medical sciences as well as its practitioners.
The lower class district was identified as the foci of infection by pointing to the poor sanitation in these areas. The state's involvement in the lives of the lower class was one of policing rather than provision of public health. It seems as though the government sought a scapegoat for the bad state of public health in Chile. These public health policies are but some of the indications of some of the class orientation in the application of public health measure by the state.
A strict programme of coercive medicalization was followed that centered its attention primarily on the lower class. One example of this is obligatory vaccination of the lower class. Editorials stated that house-to-house vaccination was the best means of combating infectious disease among the working class. The government of Chile however and the people of Chile suffered a great downfall by believing that these diseases were strictly for the working class their money prestige and power somehow left them invincible to these diseases.
Despite the failure to prevent and wipe out disease in Chile the government continued to target the working class neighborhoods as the source of infectious diseases. Doctors frequently asserted that disease such as cholera only attacked individuals who led an immoderate and solvent life and who commit excesses of all kinds of distractions. They advise that if " one wishes to avoid these mortal and painful illness that one should lead a good system of life. The doctors were primarily aiming at maintaining social control over the lives of the lower class. There were strong connections made between hygiene and morality in which the lower classes were considered to have the worst of both. The Chileans had set themselves up for a rude awakening when Chileans began to experience in larger proportions outbreaks of disease.
Summarized from "Physician the State and the Public Health in Chile" by Carl Murdock
http://www.ddg.com/LIS/aurelia/chile.htm
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cltoc.html
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field(DOCID+cl0028)
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field(DOCID+cl0026)
IV. "Tropical" Diseases"
Disease that have been labeled as tropical often gives a misleading depiction, because they are not diseases concentrated in the tropics nor were they originated in the tropics. The term "tropical diseases" implies a connotation of belonging to the area and the people of the tropics when in reality they were disease that were more specific to areas of poverty, malnutrition, and unsanitary conditions. They were also referred to as tropical diseases because their causes were often insect or vector borne illnesses. These diseases have been quite prevalent in temperate regions and have "served an ideological function of associating the disease with natural rather than social, economical, and political factors."
The rapid proliferation of diseases has been thought to be primarily a result of European interventions due to the arrival and growth of imperialism. This is not to say that vector borne diseases did not originate or exist in Latin America, but rather involves the notion of the "coining" of the term "tropical disease" which came to the Americas from Europe and not from its own tropical regions. The idea of "tropical medicine" derived from the development of socio-historical approaches in the history of medicine. Tropical disease according to historian Michael Warboys is a construction of a particular time and place.
According to Warboys, the British had by far the largest tropical empire and for a large period of time pioneered and dominated the history of tropical medicine. There was an over concentration of the disease problem in British colonies because these countries had metropolitan interests defining their medical categories and writing their medical history. This does not imply that these diseases were not prevalent in other places. The term "tropical diseases" is a fairly new term up until the nineteenth century there existed only "diseases in the tropics."
This notion correctly implied that these diseases were found elsewhere but due to the environmental conditions that were specific to the tropics they exhibited special characteristics. Medicine was practiced under special conditions of the tropics not as tropical medicine as a special topic. The major point here is one definition and its implications. Voyages, the growth of population movement had brought about global exchanges of diseases and a convergence of disease patterns all across the world. This is one theory towards the growth of tropical disease is that of European exploration which often brought with it high incidences of fevers and high mortality.
One common origin of disease in the tropics is that when migrants entered a new country their physical reaction to the processes of adaptation to the new environment experienced a kind of "seasoning" which made them ill. The Europeans were especially susceptible to this phenomenon. One popular example of this theory is the dissemination of the Amerindian population by diseases carried by European settlers and slaves from Africa. These diseases were common in Canada, the Southern United States. North and South Africa, Australia and the West Indies. It was not until the decline of mortality in Europe and North America that the idea of "Tropical Diseases" emerged.
The idea of tropical diseases flowed from old ideas of the tropics being a place of deterioration and degeneration of people plants and animals. The temperature, humidity and the sun were thought to have weakened the European races and were said to "unbalance the humours of the white races."
Robert Knox believed that each race naturally originated and belonged to a specific region and would degenerate elsewhere. As time progressed in the nineteenth century the idea arose of the possibility that people could adapt or acclimatize to other places, climates, and disease. The emphasis was on control of the environment. This idea became of significant importance to European explorers that welcomed the idea of expansion. The idea of Europeans being able to acclimatize would be proof of their racial superiority. Although diseases of the tropics were being helped by new medical innovations the primary purpose of combating disease in the tropics was not to help the natives but to but to protect the Europeans.
The Europeans emphasized social and physical separation and there contrast was between the "clean Europeans" and "the dirty natives." Views of the people of Latin America were based on prejudice and a limited view limited exposure to natives. The increases in mortality rates among African slaves and the indigenous population was due primarily to the expansion of economic, social, and environmental changes caused by imperialism. The specter of the "white man's grave" still haunted certain areas and disease was still regarded as the primary factor inhibiting colonial investments. Contagionism tied disease to "tropical people" leading to the segregation of towns. These actions were not empirically based on any detailed study of the medical practices of the health of the natives. According to Warboys the only reason to even acknowledge the indigenous medical practice was to dismiss it as primitive, superstitious and dangerous.
A summary of "Tropical Diseases" by Michael Warboys
For many colonial writers and physicians, tropical nature was Purgatory shabbily disguised as Eden. No place for a white man, and yet just the place for white dominion over man and nature. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, physicians sought first to formulate and then to resolve this "medical conundrum of imperialism." Taken from: http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/bulletin_of_the_history_of_medicine/70.1anderson01.html In doing so, they mixed a potent brew of race theory, geographical pathology, and global politics. They called it the study of "acclimatization," and for much of this period it was both creditable science and conventional medicine. Moreover, this medical investigation of interactions between racial constitutions and regional environments structured the colonial administrative doctrine of all the European powers.
http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/bulletin_of_the_history_of_medicine/70.1anderson01.html
http://www.isis.vt.edu/~fanjun/text/Link_pest9.html
http://ftp.tc.cornell.edu/Visualization/Staff/richard/NIH/Faerman/Chagas.html
V. The Application of Scientific Disciplines in Latin America
The acceptance and application of certain scientific disciplines in Latin America has been replete with biased and racist interpretations of science. The history of certain scientific disciplines were often receptive to works of well known scientists that were considered to be at the forefront or at the center of contemporary scientific innovations. The implantation of a scientific ethos in Latin America was strongly influenced by the positivists of the nineteenth century. In Latin America positivism "precipitated scientific culture, instead of resulting from scientific thought" as was the case in Europe. The reasoning follows that if positivism followed the development of science in Latin America that the same would be true for "science policy and the discussion and evaluation of the place in science in society." The origin of a scientific ethos in Latin America took place in a politically charged atmosphere that had very political application of the sciences.
The promotion and implementation and application of Darwinism for example was described as a "matter of political action." Social Darwinism which is also referred to as Social Spencerianism because Darwin applied the term to his theory to stress the struggle survival competition among life's organisms. Darwin did not mean to extend the concept of natural selection into a social sphere. However, in Latin America, much of the application of social Darwinism was used to relate to the "distinction" between Europeans, Blacks, and Indians. Brazilians in Particular were especially concerned with
What they thought to be a "biological differentiation" between various racial groups. Euclides da Cunha was an extremist social Darwinism that published his view of the human racial hierarchy in his book entitled "Rebellion in the Backlands." This piece of literature gives an account of the revolt of the mestizos, which were brutally put down by the Brazilian government in 1867. He describes these people s being racial degenerate a "hyphen between three races" Indo-Europeans, Blacks and the Indians.
According to da Cunha there was an inferior and a superior race. He asserted that even when the superior race had acted upon the inferior one there still remained traces of the inferior one. He describes the very nature of these people as "degenerate" and as "intruder in the struggle for survival." He describes the Negro race as being "primitive" and states that there exists the "natural" tendency for regression to the primitive race. He said that the primitive races seek intermarriage with white to extinguish their "despised trait." Another representative figure of social Darwinism in Latin America was Cuban anthropologists Fernando Ortiz. He viewed Blacks as primitive and lustful. He has said that, "Evolution is today the law of life in all of its manifestations… Perhaps our national future could in the end be nothing more than a complex problem of ethnic selection. [Humanity] continues abandoned to the most elementary socio-physical laws, struggling against the general biological promiscuity of inferior species."
Another discipline that uses the application of science to discriminate amongst its people is Eugenics. Eugenics in Europe was an attempt to promote biologization of social problems and propose so-called "scientific solutions" to them. In Europe eugenics had in origins and inspiration from Mendelian genetics. According to this theory people that were perceived as racially or socially unfit could be sterilized so that the "socially undesirables" would not be selected. One extreme application of Eugenic policy was its use to exterminate the Jews in the Nazi racial programme.
The application of Eugenics in Latin America was to large degree about race. As author Nancy Stephan illustrates " all Latin American Eugenic movement was to a lesser or greater degree about race." There was a particular concentration of preserving the racial purity of the white race. In countries were miscegenation was a problem they wanted to encourage the immigration of racial groups that were racially and socially desirable, these "favored groups" were primarily from Europe.
In Argentina for example this thought was applied to migration procedures. They wanted to limit immigration of Jews, Arabs, and other people whom they felt could not assimilate. Victor Delfino who became the founder of the Eugenics Society in Argentina took this as far as to argue for the control of immigration and to ban racial crossing. Other thought that the races that were considered to be degenerates and inferior could be brought to normalcy by breeding them with whites or "aryanizing" or "whitening" them through intermarriage.
These applications of science call into question the concept of the original version of the science. Once these sciences were recepted from the people that had originally proposed or postulated them they had been changed and applied in such different ways from the "original cognitive systems" that the original idea had lost most of its significance.
A summary of "Science and Society in Twentieth Century Latin America" by Thomas Glick…
References
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/timelines/htimeline3.htm
http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/bulletin_of_the_history_of_medicine/70.1anderson01.html
http://www.isis.vt.edu/~fanjun/text/Link_pest9.html
http://ftp.tc.cornell.edu/Visualization/Staff/richard/NIH/Faerman/Chagas.html
http://www.ddg.com/LIS/aurelia/chile.htm
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cltoc.html
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field(DOCID+cl0028)
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field(DOCID+cl0026)
http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/bulletin_of_the_history_of_medicine/70.1anderson01.html
http://www.ddg.com/LIS/aurelia/titpag.htm
http://www.ddg.com/LIS/aurelia/peru.htm
A summary of "Tropical Diseases in Latin America" by Michael Warboys
A summary "Physicians the State and the Public Health in Chile" by Carl Murdock
A summary of "Andean Biology in Peru: Scientific Styles on the Periphery" by Marcos Cueto
