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Nancy Leys Stepan was formerly Professor of Modern History and Senior Fellow of the Wellcome Unit in the History of Medicine at the University of Oxford and is currently Professor of History at Columbia University.

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Feminism and Science (1996) — Medewerker — 80 exemplaren

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I picked this up at a Half Price Books back in like 2012 for a history paper I was thinking of writing. I didn't end up writing the paper - and this book would have been completely useless for the end date of 1750 the paper would have covered - but I have finally read this book. It was an interesting snapshot on the history of science - both Brazil in the early twentieth century, and the academic field in the 1960s when this book was published.

This ended up basically being a limited snapshot of Brazil's attempt to enter the developed scientific world, mostly focused 1890-1920. This gets the great Brazilian scientists - Cruz, Lutz, Chagas, and a few others.

By nature of the time period, economic state of Brazil, and Western health issues visiting the tropics (i.e. yellow fever), Brazil was just breaking with the Portuguese empire and was in a situation where it had to decide which European power to scientifically ally itself with (Stepan mentions the US had basically adopted the German model; Brazil leaned vaguely Frenchward).

It was an exciting time in microbiology - vaccines for smallpox and the bubonic plague were just being invented, and he rush was on to identify viruses and bacteria to make the next big discovery.
Yellow Fever was a common tropical problem (it existed in the southern US, but post-Civil War the South didn't have the money or political clout to devote national research funds toward the problem). Yellow fever also made Europeans unwilling to visit/emigrate to tropical countries, who were therefore motivated to fix the problem so they could grow their nations.

This book mainly focuses on Oswaldo Cruz's efforts to solve this problem for Brazil, and the reasons it is so hard to establish a scientific community in developing countries. Though written in 1976, a lot of Stepan's statements and hypotheses seem likely to apply to developing nations today.

It was an interesting read about a brief flurry of activity and success (at some point, there was a military coup over state-mandated smallpox vaccines - until tens of thousands of people died the next year), followed by slow stagnation as the great minds failed to elevate and promote younger scientists with newer ideas to keep the growth going.

Stepan's history is also limited by Brazil's troubled political history leading up to the 1970s. I'm curious to see what she thinks of the state of their scientific community now.
This was an interesting read with some interesting arguments. Worth the $3.50 I paid on a lark!

As an aside, I continue to laugh that history academia assumes everybody has a working literacy in French and Latin. There were a few completely untranslated paragraphs of French, but Stepan was kind enough to translate Portuguese to English when she had to make a direct quote (almost all of her sources were in Portuguese).
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Tikimoof | Feb 17, 2022 |
i'm using this book as a text for an undergraduate class that I'm teaching on race and class in Latin America. Its a very accessible text for undergraduates and generally free of confusing academic jargon.

Stepan argues that understanding eugenics in Latin America can help us to understand better both the history of science and the history of Latin America. Latin America has generally been left out of intellectual histories, as most scholars have preferred to view it as a passive receptor of ideas rather than as a generator of its own scientific knowledge. Through her analysis of eugenics as practiced in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, Stepan easily refutes these generalizations about Latin American intellectual underdevelopment. Additionally, her work echos that of Thomas Kuhn and his arguments about cultural changes that lead to changes in scientific knowledge, rather than the other way around. Stepan shows that Latin Americans did indeed understand eugenic theories, but that they adapted them to try to solve persistent social problems that seemed to be linked to mixed race people and national underdevelopment. Because of the focus on using eugenics to solve social problems, Latin American eugenics developed very differently from its scary counterparts in the U.S. and Nazi Germany.

This book is well researched, drawing on literature that treats the history of science both inside and outside of Latin America, as well as incorporating archival research from various Latin American groups devoted to developing eugenic sciences.

This has been a really good book to teach with and it has provoked a lot of thoughtful discussion from students.
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lisamunro | Oct 23, 2013 |
The last case of Small Pox worldwide was reported in Somalia in 1977. In 1980, the World Health Organization (WHO) formally declared the successful eradication of this disease. Thus, it became the first and, to date, the only disease to be successfully eradicated as defined by Dr Fred Soper (1893-1977) ie. the reduction of a disease to zero through deliberate intervention.

It was not, however, the only or even the first or most costly attempt at eradication. Malaria, Yellow Fever, Polio, and Guinea Worm have also been targeted at various times and to varying degrees of success. This book outlines the history of eradication , the different methods used and the different countries they were used in, and why, so far, with the exception of Small Pox, they have failed. The author discusses the socio-economic, biological, and political aspects of each attempt. She also discusses whether eradication is an achievable or even desirable goal and looks at other, less absolute, approaches to disease control.

This book is a fascinating look at the history of disease eradication. It is well-written and well-researched. It is aimed at the general reader as well as historians and those in the field of medicine. As one of those general readers, I can't say that this is an easy read - there are no fun stories interspersed among the facts - but if, like me, you like your history, well, historical, this is definitely a book worth reading on one of the most important problems facing us today - the state of the world's health.
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lostinalibrary | Jan 1, 2012 |

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