E-Books →Poisoned Eden Cholera Epidemics, State-Building, and the Problem of Public Health in Tucumán, Argentina, 1865-1908

In Poisoned Eden Carlos S. Dimas analyzes the social, political, and cultural effects of three epidemics, in 1868, 1886, and 1895, that shook the northwestern province of Tucumán to understand the role of public health in building the Argentine state in the late nineteenth century. Through a reading of medical and ethnographic material, Dimas shows that cholera became intertwined in all areas of the social fabric and that Tucumanos of all classes created public health services that expanded the state's presence in the interior. In each outbreak, provincial powers contended with how to ensure the province's autonomy while simultaneously meeting the needs of the state to eradicate cholera. Centering disease, Poisoned Eden demonstrates how public health and debates on cholera's contagion became a central concern of the nineteenth-century Latin American state and promoted national cohesion.