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Historical painting of cuban physician Tomas Romay

CULTURES OF HEALTH

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Home / History International Health

Research and Publications by the Chair

Steven Palmer

Canada Research Chair in History of International Health

Associate Professor Department of History

 
Steve has been professor at the University of Windsor since July 2001, and was appointed to the Chair in April 2006.

His principal field of interest is the history of health and medicine in Latin America and the Caribbean from the late 18th century to the present. His own research tends to focus on the social, cultural, and political dimensions of the field. Click here to obtain a pdf copy of his CV.

 
 
Featured recent publication:
 

“Migrant Clinics and Frontier Science: The Peripheral Origins of International Health, 1840-1914,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 83 (4), winter 2009: 676-709.

 
 
Current research projects:
 
The Cuban Medical Complex, 1790-1930 – a study of the professional, scientific and political dynamics of the growing community of Cuban-born medical practitioners in the last century of Spanish colonial rule, with a special focus on the role of plantation medicine and scientific racism.
 
Cholera, Ethnicity, and the Political Geography of State Medicine in Costa Rica, 1991-1998 – a study of the country’s extremely successful public health response to the cholera epidemic in Latin America in the early 1990s, with special attention to the manner in which the ethnicity of potential carriers, especially those Nicaraguans and Salvadorans entering illegally via the northern frontier, was medicalized.
 
Diphtheria and Canadian Public Health: Ontario Immunization Programs, 1920-1940 – a study of the innovative immunization program carried out by public health teams in select Ontario urban centres, including Windsor, with special attention to health communication strategies to overcome vaccinophobia.
 
Patriotic Pathologies: Health, Disease and National Identity in Comparative Perspective – a collaborative project, with Gilberto Hochman of FIOCRUZ (Brazil), and Maria Silvia Di Liscia of Universidad de la Pampa (Argentina); to compare the manner in which particular diseases, or disease bundles, were evoked by medical communities in a variety of Latin American countries to animate, define, or explain national characteristics.
 
Cultures of Hygiene in the Latin American City – a collaborative project, with Diego Armus (Swarthmore - USA), Claudia Agostoni (UNAM - Mexico), Paulo Drinot (Manchester - UK), Gilberto Hochman and Nisia Trindade Lima (FIOCRUZ - Brazil), and Alexandra Stern (Michigan – USA) to explore the rise of dense discursive practices promoting and regulating hygiene in the 20th-century Latin American city.
 
Hookworm Disease and the Birth of International Health Programs in Central America and the Caribbean – a study of the Rockefeller Foundation’s first program of public health treatment, the campaigns against hookworm disease in Central America and the British Caribbean, 1914-1930.
 
Pictures of (International) Health – an on-line exhibition of photographs from the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Board. The exhibition, being carried out with the Rockefeller Archive Center, will be the first time the valuable International Health collection has been made available electronically. The exhibition will be a featured item on the Cultures of Health website, and will invited scholars who have used the photographs to engage in a joint curatorial discussion by way of putting together an audio guide to the exhibition.
 
 
His books include:

Launching Global Health: The Caribbean Odyssey of the Rockefeller Foundation. University of Michigan Press, 2010.
 
From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism. Doctors, Healers and Public Power in Costa Rica, 1800-1940. Duke University Press. 2003.
 
María Silvia Di Liscia, Gilberto Hochman, and Steven Palmer, eds., Patologías de la Patria. Enfermedades, Enfermos, y Nacón en América Latina (Buenos Aires, forthcoming).
 
Juanita De Barros, Steven Palmer and David Wright, eds., Health and Medicine in the circum-Caribbean: 1800-1968. N.Y: Routledge, 2009.
 
Steven Palmer and Ivan Molina, eds., The Costa Rica Reader. History, Culture, Politics. Duke University Press. 2004 
 

Articles in Scholarly Journals:
 
"Beginnings of Cuban Bacteriology: Juan Santos Fernandez, Medical Research and the Problem of Scientific Sovereignty," Hispanic American Historical Review, special issue on the work of Nancy Leys Stepan, forthcoming.
 
Gilberto Hochman and Steven Palmer, "An Interview with Donald A. Henderson on the 30th Anniversary of the Eradication of Smallpox," Histôria, Ciencias, Saude – Manguinhos, forthcoming.
 
 
“Migrant Clinics and Frontier Science: The Peripheral Origins of International Health, 1840-1914,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 83 (4), winter 2009: 676-709.
 
 
Steven Palmer and Ligia Peña, “A Rockefeller Foundation Health Primer for US-Occupied Nicaragua, 1914-1928,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 25 (1), January, 2008: 43-69.
 
 
 
Chapters in Books:
 
“From the Plantation to the Academy: Slavery and the Production of Cuban Medicine, 1800-1880,” in De Barros, Palmer and Wright, eds., Health and Medicine and in the Caribbean, 1800- 1968. N.Y.: Routledge, 2009: 56-83.
 
“El Héroe Indicado (o un Estado en Búsqueda de su Nación): Juan Santamaría, La Batakka de Rivas y la Simbología Liberal, 1880-1895,” in Iván Molina Jiménez eds., Industriosa Y Sobria: Costa Rica En Los Días De La Campaña Nacional (1856-1857) (Alajuela: Plumsock Mesoamerican Studies, 2007) pp. 111-130
 
Steven Palmer, Juanita De Barros and David Wright, “Introduction,” in De Barros, Palmer and Wright, eds., Health and Medicine and in the Caribbean, 1800-1968. N.Y.: Routledge, 2009, pp. 1-11.
 
 
Encyclopaedia and Dictionary Article:
 
Steven Palmer, “Rafael Angel Calderon Guardia,” in W. and H. Bynum, eds., Dictionary of Medical Biography, Greenwood, 2007.
 
Steven Palmer, “Carlos Duran,” in W. and H. Bynum, eds., Dictionary of Medical Biography, Greenwood.

Steven Palmer, “Jose Santos Fernandez,” in W. and H. Bynum, eds., Dictionary of Medical Biography, Greenwood.

 
Steven Palmer and Diego Armus, “Disease and Health in Latin America,” in the Oxford Encyclopaedia of World History, In Press.
 
Steven Palmer and Diego Armus, “Medicine and Public Health in Latin America,” in the Oxford Encyclopaedia of World History, In Press.
 
 

Book reviews:
 
John Farley, Brock Chisholm, the World Health Organization and the Cold War, Canadian Bulletin for the History of Medicine, forthcoming.
 
Anne-Emanuelle Birn, Marriage of Convenience: Rockefeller International Health and Revolutionary Mexico, in British Latin American Research Review, 2008.
 

 
Conference coordination:
 
Coordinator, with Claudia Agostoni, of the international seminar ‘Prácticas, Objetos y Actores de Salud en America Latina durante el Siglo XX. Continuidades, Cambios e Innovaciones,’ Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México D.F., 5 – 7 November 2008.
 
Coordinator, with Gilberto Hochman and Maria Silvia di Liscia, of the inernational seminar ‘Patologias de Pátria: Saúde, Doença e Identidade Nacional em Perspectiva Comparada,’ Programa de Pós-Graduação em Historia das Ciências e da Saúde da Casa Oswaldo Cruz, 18 – 19 March 2008.
 
“Slavery and Freedom in the Atlantic World: Science, Statutes, and the Seas”, University of Michigan – University of Windsor Joint Colloquium, 30 March – 1 April, 2006, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario.
 
 
Panel organizer:
 
“Salud y Control en Costa Rica: Historias Recientes”, IX Congreso Centroamericano de Historia, Universidad de Costa Rica, 23 July 2008.
 
 
Papers:
 
2009 “Migrant Suffering and Hookworm Science: The Frontier Origins of International Health, 1840-1920,” European Association for the History of Medicine and Health Conferences, Heidelberg, September 4-6.
 
 
2009 (invited) “Political and Economic Models of Bacteriological Enterprise in Late Colonial Havana,” Cultures of Hygiene in the Atlanatic World, University of Manchester, September 3.
 
 
2009 “Hookworm Disease and the Genealogy of International Health”, LASA XXVIII International Congress, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 11 June 2009.
 
 
2009 “Smallpox Eradication and Cultural Experience: A Connaught Scientitst’s Travel Notes on Canada-Brazil Vaccine Collaboration, 1966-1974”, Annual Conference of the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine and the Canadian Association for the History of Nursing, Carleton University, Ottawa, 31 May, 2009.
 
 
2009 (invited) “Medical Eclecticism in Latin America, 1900-1940,” Canada Research Chair in Medical Pluralism, Université de Montréal, 13 May.
 
2009 (invited) “Costa Rica en el Siglo XX: Excepciones del Excepcionalismo”, Fundación Ortega, Madrid, España, 6 May, 2009.
 
 
2009 (invited) “La profesión médica en Costa Rica y Cuba, 1850-1920. Una aproximación comparativa”, Grupo de Estudios Americanos / Instituto de Historia del Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, CSIC, Madrid, España, 5 May, 2009.
 
 
2009 (invited) “Milling Pathologies: The Production of Scientific Medicine in Cuba 1875-1920”, The Martin Wesley Lectures Series, Humanities Research Group, Universtity of Windsor, Windsor, 19 January 2009.
 
 
2009 (invited) “Eclectic Healers of Latin America”, Swarthmore College, 9 April 2009.
 
 
2008 “Intertropical Pathology vs. Tropical Medicine: A Cuban Scientist Between Empires”, Seminario Internacional Prácticas, Objetos y Actores de Salud en America Latina durante el Siglo XX. Continuidades, Cambios e Innovaciones, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México D.F., 5 November 2008.
 
 
2008 “Cholera, Ethnicity, and the Political Geography of State Medicine in Costa Rica in the 1990s”, IX Central America History Congress, University of Costa Rica, 23 July 2008.
 
 
2008 “El Ingenio Médico: Scientific Sovereignty in Late Colonial Cuba”, CALACS Conference, Vancouver, 4 June 2008.
 
 
2008 (invited) “The Medical Mill: Slavery and Medicine in 19th-Century Cuba,”, Indiana University, 9 April 2008.
 
 
2008 “Limpieza de Nación: El Cólera en Costa Rica en la década de 1990”, Patologías de Pátria: Saúde, Doença e Identidade Nacional em Perspectiva Comparada, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Historia das Ciências e da Saúde da Casa Oswaldo Cruz, 18 march 2008.
 
 
2007 “”Havana Vision: Problems of a Doctor’s Notebooks,” Latin American History Group, Toronto, 26 October 2007.

2006 (invited) “El Héroe Indicado (o un Estado en búsqueda de su Nación): Juan Santamaría, la Batalla de Rivas y la Simbología Liberal, 1880-1985”, Alajuela, Costa Rica, 13 April 2006.

 
 
2006 “Slavery and the Production of Medicine in Cuba, 1800-1880,” Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CALACS) Conference, University of Calgary, 30 September 2006.
 
2006 (invited) “From the Plantation to the Academy: Medicine and Slavery in Cuba in the 19th Century”, Humanities Center, Wayne State University, 7 November 2006.