Main description:

In 1895, after enduring two previous cholera epidemics and facing horrific hygienic conditions and the fear of another epidemic, officials in the Argentine province of Tucuman described their home as the "Poisoned Eden," a play on its official title, "Garden of the Republic." Cholera elicited fear and panic in the nineteenth century, and although the disease never had the demographic impact of tuberculosis, malaria, or influenza, cholera was a source of consternation that often illuminated dormant social problems.

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 Tucuman 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.

Contents:

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Biomedical Uncertainty and the Politics of Public Health
Part 1. Foundations and Context
1. A Garden in the Republic: Land, Labor, and Life in Nineteenth-Century Tucuman
2. The Global Age of Cholera: Argentina's Late Confrontation with Cholera
Part 2. Environments and Peripheries in the Fourth Pandemic
3. Regional Health: Cholera from the Frontlines of the Paraguayan War to Tucuman, 1865-67
4. Provincial Health: Contestations over Governance in Tucuman and the Limitations of Medicalization during the Cholera Epidemic of 1867-68
Part 3. The Politics of Contagion and Political Conflict
5. The Plague of Fear: The Politics of Sanitary Cordons and Questions of Governance in the National Cholera Epidemic of 1886-87
6. The Cholera Epidemic of 1886-87 in Tucuman: From Provincial Health to National Health
Part 4. Medical Expansion
7. Purifying the Land against Cholera: The Epidemic of 1894-95 and Medical Expansion in Tucuman during the Era of Reform
Epilogue: Uncertainty, Futility, and Thinking of Cholera under COVID-19
Notes
Bibliography
Index