ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Tropical diseases and biomedicine’s mundane technologies

• In Event: (Re)thinking Histories of Disease in the “Tropics” (II)

English Abstract

On September 12-14, 1962, the International Atomic Energy Agency organized a small expert meeting on Radioisotopes in Tropical Medicine. Invitations were sent to a dozen of experts and the World Health Organization on areas as far apart as protein metabolism, hematology, gastroenterology, parasitology, and entomology. By the time the experts gathered in Vienna, the IAEA was just trying to catch up with the uses of biomedical technologies in the contested and blurry field of tropical diseases as practiced in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Kingston, Kampala, or Liverpool.
Radioisotopes, electrophoresis, immunoassays, and other biomedical technologies of the 1950s and 1960s can be used as historical tracers of transregional networks of expertise. I call them mundane technologies: technologies which became relatively unexpensive, available, and transportable when compared with their bulkier and costlier interwar cousins -large machines like the cyclotrons, the Tiselius apparatus, or Svedberg’s ultracentrifuge. Following the mundane technologies of biomedical research reveals how political and economic frontiers could be crossed in the context of international development programs during the early Cold War.
In this talk, I will briefly illustrate how the study of the biochemistry of severe protein malnutrition (kwashiorkor), and its effects on children, brought together British and Latin American scientists, as well as cultures of experimentation and interpretation. While challenging the view of biomedicine as an ivory-tower endeavor practiced at privileged sites and indifferent to local needs and development aspirations, the talk explores local versions of internal colonialism and the uses of biomedicine to racialize populations.

Author

• Edna Suárez-Díaz, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México