Peripheral nerve: health and medicine in Cold War Latin America | Anne-Emanuelle Birn e Raúl Necochea López

Anne Emanuelle Birn Imagem University of Toronto
Anne-Emanuelle Birn | Imagem: University of Toronto

Scholars of Latin America are familiar with the narrative of the Cold War in the region. The stories we tell about the second half of the twentieth century often rely on narrative scaffolding provided by the Cold War; after all, the global influence of the ideological, political, economic, and military battles between the United States and Soviet Union permeated all aspects of people’s lives to various degrees. In these stories, the Latin American Third World is presented as influenced, persuaded, and pressured by the two global superpowers while politicians and policymakers made decisions about the path nations would take towards development and globalization (see, e.g., Smith, 2007). In Peripheral nerve: health and medicine in Cold War Latin America , Anne-Emanuelle Birn and Raúl Necochea López present a different way to look at the Cold War era in Latin America, with a more nuanced view of how different people in different places experienced, reacted to, and acted during the Cold War. This is not an alternative approach meant to decenter the Cold War: on the contrary, the authors and editors illustrate the complexity of the Cold War on the ground, on the so-called peripheries of development. This book demonstrates that people in Latin America had the “nerve” to face international pressures and make choices that, while under the veil of the Cold War dichotomy, had more to do with the individual local realities than the larger battle between First and Second Worlds. To learn how Latin Americans dealt with the Cold War on a local and international level this book is essential. Leia Mais