bookPart
Histories and narratives of yellow fever in Latin America
Autor
García, Mónica
Institución
Resumen
This chapter discusses the historiographic perspectives that have dominated the historical narratives of yellow fever in Latin America. Almost invariably, historians have assumed that previous accounts of yellow fever refer to the same yellow fever that historians know and understand according to modern medicine. We identify the development of medical bacteriology as the dividing line between old ideas and the new path that led to current notions of fever, such as that caused by a microorganism, a virus. But no matter how we intend to historicize medical notions about fever, most of us have avoided questions about what the 'vomit preto', black vomit, yellow fever, or the periodic fevers of the yellow fever variety meant. , according to the interpretations of the contemporaries. and worldviews. The historiography of yellow fever in Latin America conveys the assumption that when historians find these terms in documents produced by physicians and policymakers anywhere, anytime, those expressions invariably refer to the same yellow fever: acute viral hemorrhagic disease transmitted by infected and distinguishable mosquitoes thanks to salient symptoms such as jaundice, black vomiting and fever. The unintended consequence of this apparently unproblematic decision is that we ignore one of the fundamental questions related to the study of diseases historically: the controversial nature of medical knowledge, therefore, of the things designated by it. The objective of this chapter is to analyze the historiographic approach to yellow fever, particularly the one that takes current medical knowledge for granted and makes a retrospective diagnosis, an approach that could be called presenteeism in the historiography of yellow fever.1 The various narratives that have occurred from that point of view are summarized here. Finally, in the last part of this chapter, a brief exposition of some of the perspectives and themes that could help us overcome this presenteeism is analyzed.