Steven PalmerHistory professor Steven Palmer’s book on Medicine and Public Health in Latin America has won an award from the American Association for the History of Medicine.

History professor’s latest book honoured with award

Calling it “an extremely ambitious feat” of scholarship, the American Association for the History of Medicine has honoured a book co-authored by UWindsor history professor Steven Palmer.

Dr. Palmer, Canada Research Chair in History of International Health from 2006 to 2016, and co-author Marcos Cueto of the Instituto de Estudios Persuanos in Lima, Peru, received the 2017 George Rosen Prize for their book Medicine and Public Health in Latin America: A History.

The prize recognizes an outstanding book, article, essay, edited volume, museum exhibition, film or other significant contribution to the history of public health or social medicine.

In announcing the selection, committee chair David Barnes predicted 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.

“Cueto and Palmer have pulled off an extremely ambitious feat in critically synthesizing a vast array of secondary (and some primary) sources covering more than five hundred years and more than forty countries,” he wrote. “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 says the two endeavoured to synthesize work in individual countries and bring it to the emerging global history of medicine, making this “high-profile prize from the world’s premier association a perfect cap to that project.”