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Marcos Cueto, Carlos S. Dimas. Poisoned Eden: Cholera Epidemics, State-Building, and the Problem of Public Health in Tucumán, Argentina, 1865–1908., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 2, June 2024, Pages 774–775, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae092
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Cholera had a strong impact in Argentina and several Latin American countries during the nineteenth century. However, most studies produced during the past few years have appeared in Spanish and Portuguese. Carlos S. Dimas’s Poisoned Eden: Cholera Epidemics, State-Building, and the Problem of Public Health in Tucumán, Argentina, 1865–1908 is to date the best sociomedical history of the epidemics of 1868, 1886, and 1895 in Argentina available in English. It fills a void and illuminates the medicalization of society in an insufficiently studied region, the northwestern province of Tucumán. Inspired by the classic work on cholera by historian of medicine, Charles Rosenberg, and novel perspectives on classic themes of histories of medicine, like the controversy between contagionist and anti-contagionist medical ideas plagued by eclecticism and unclear boundaries, this book relies on a multiplicity of sources, including theses by medical students at the universities of Buenos Aires and Córdoba, academic and official publications, travel narratives, newspaper articles, and compelling caricatures.