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Beginnings of Brazilian Science
Oswaldo Cruz, Medical Research and Policy, 1890-1920
- GenresNonfiction
225 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1976
About the author
Nancy Stepan
8 books3 followersNancy Leys Stepan is Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University. She is the author of Eradication, "The Hour of Eugenics": Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America and Picturing Tropical Nature.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 17, 2021
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).
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).
Displaying 1 of 1 review