From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism: Doctors, Healers, and Public Power in Costa Rica, 1800–1940 - Tapa dura

"As a comprehensive study of the medical profession in Costa Rica and a sound comparison with medical developments in Latin America, this work is remarkable, novel, and useful. Steven Palmer's integrated analysis of class, gender, professional hierarchy, and hybrid medical combinations is superb. This work will be a splendid addition to an emerging literature on the social history of medicine in Latin America."-Marcos Cueto, author of The Return of Epidemics: Health and Society in Peru during the Twentieth Century "From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism presents new material of substantial interest to both Latin American specialists and medical historians. Steven Palmer has marshaled a convincing story in a challenging way that both informs and raises issues for debate."-John K. Crellin, coauthor of Professionalism and Ethics in Complementary and Alternative Medicine

From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism presents the history of medical practice in Costa Rica from the late colonial era-when none of the fifty thousand inhabitants had access to a titled physician, pharmacist, or midwife-to the 1940s, when the figure of the qualified medical doctor was part of everyday life for many of Costa Rica's nearly one million citizens. It is the first book to chronicle the history of all healers, both professional and popular, in a Latin American country during the national period. Steven Palmer breaks with the view of popular and professional medicine as polar opposites-where popular medicine is seen as representative of the authentic local community and as synonymous with oral tradition and religious and magical beliefs and professional medicine as advancing neocolonial interests through the work of secular, trained academicians. Arguing that there was significant and formative overlap between these two forms of medicine, Palmer shows that the relationship between practitioners of each was marked by coexistence, complementarity, and dialogue as often as it was by rivalry. Palmer explains that while the professionalization of medical practice was intricately connected to the nation-building process, the Costa Rican state never consistently displayed an interest in suppressing the practice of popular medicine. In fact, it persistently found both tacit and explicit ways to allow untitled healers to practice. Using empirical and archival research to bring people (such as the famous healer or curandero Professor Carlos Carbell), events, and institutions (including the Rockefeller Foundation) to life, From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism demonstrates that it was through everyday acts of negotiation among agents of the state, medical professionals, and popular practitioners that the contours of Costa Rica's modern, heterogeneous health care system were established.