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Swarthmore College Works History Faculty Works History 12-1-2008 Review Of "Cold War, Deadly Fevers: Malaria Eradication In Mexico, 1955-1975" By M. Cueto Diego Armus Swarthmore College, darmus1@swarthmore.edu This work is brought to you for free and open access by . It has been accepted for inclusion in History Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu. Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-history  Part of the History Commons Let us know how access to these works benefits you  Recommended Citation Diego Armus. (2008). "Review Of "Cold War, Deadly Fevers: Malaria Eradication In Mexico, 1955-1975" By M. Cueto". Isis. Volume 99, Issue 4. 868-869. DOI: 10.1086/597730 https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-history/41 Marcos Cueto. Cold War, Deadly Fevers: Malaria Eradication in Mexico, 1955–1975 .Cold War, Deadly Fevers: Malaria Eradication in Mexico, 1955–1975 by Marcos CuetoReview by: By Diego   ArmusIsis, Vol. 99, No. 4 (December 2008), pp. 868-869Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/597730 .Accessed: 05/09/2014 13:44Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp .JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. .The University of Chicago Press and The History of Science Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Isis.http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Fri, 5 Sep 2014 13:44:50 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditionsmost important and interesting. There are sixessays, by several leading figures involved inthis debate, all written from a perspective of“evolution-acceptance” (but not, despite the IDtrope, “belief in evolution,” which reduces evo-lutionary biology to a religious doctrine). Thatsaid, there is little new here either, so the vol-ume becomes a handy source rather than a con-tribution to the debate.In the opening essay, Nathaniel Comfort—unlike Kitcher—rejects the idea that ID is cre-ationism, instead arguing that it is a new, ordifferent, idea, a general anti-Darwinism, op-posed by anticreationists, not evolutionists. Howuseful this distinction can be is unclear. It is truethat opposition to evolution is part of a generalopposition to “modernity,” but the very term“Darwinism” seems to be a vague and overex-tended fiction. Comfort thinks that the intelli-gent designists bear only vestiges of the oldercreationism—a view I think the Dover decisionpretty much disproved. He also critiques whathe calls “cultural Darwinism,” which seems tobe roughly genetic determinism and the appli-cation of selection to cultural change. His his-torical account of “scientism” is at best onesided and at worst repeats rhetorical myths.Michael Ruse’s chapter gives an excellentsummary of the history of arguments from de-sign. While it repeats the content of his booksMonad to Man (Harvard, 1996) and Darwin andDesign (Harvard, 2003), it is good to havesomething that one might assign as reading toundergraduates in a science and religion course.My only queries—not quibbles—are whetherPaley wrote his Natural Theology in the light ofHume or if he was unaware of Hume’s Dia-logues and whether John Ray’s natural theologywas founded on Boyle’s (and perhaps Harvey’s)or if it was independent.Scott Gilbert amusingly applies the pedagogyof evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) to teaching the controversy: to understandnormal science, find the loss-of-function mutant.ID is that mutant: what science would look likewithout experiment or causation. He points outwhat has come to be known as “quote mining”by ID advocates: take out of context any phraseby an established scientist that might be read tounderpin ID. Gilbert has himself been one of thevictims here. Since evo-devo is often touted asan alternative to evolution (rather than a com-plementary program), Gilbert identifies the dif-ferences between ID and evo-devo. ID is, hesays, “in the tradition of American flimflam art-istry” (p. 47) rather than that of Paley, Aquinas,and Plato. He goes on to show that if there is aDesigner, he’s a lousy municipal engineer, of-fering examples from shared genes. He correctlyidentifies the motivation for ID as evolutionbeing seen as an attack on providence, not lit-eralism.Edward Larson offers an extensive review ofthe attempts to have creationism or ID installedin classrooms in America, although I think hisclaim that special creation was the Christiandefault and that the Enlightenment revived evo-lutionary thinking is historically wrong. JaneMaienschein’s chapter discusses the relationsbetween science and religion in general, with IDand stem cells as examples of the “entanglementof beliefs” (pp. 91 ff, 87 ff ). She untanglesseveral issues to make things a lot clearer, moreelaborately than Kitcher.Robert Young’s essay is curious. He treatsDarwin and Wallace as being part of the naturaltheology movement (which is correct), but thenfails to capitalize on that observation: that Dar-winian thinking is evolving and that teleologicalideas (like Dawkins’s “designoids”) could per-haps be expunged to complete the revolutionthey began. Nevertheless, his essay is a sourcefor much interesting correspondence and ex-cerpts of Darwin’s and Wallace’s works that areoften overlooked.Overall, neither of these books is going to killthe zombie, but both add to the debate.JOHN WILKINSMarcos Cueto. Cold War, Deadly Fevers: Ma-laria Eradication in Mexico, 1955–1975. xvi 264 pp., figs., tables, bibl., index. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. $45(cloth).Cold War, Deadly Fevers is a good example ofquestions and narrative styles historians of LatinAmerican public health have been developing inthe last decade. In a way, the book is bothhistory of public health and history in publichealth. On the one hand, it offers a quite detailedaccount of the relations among the Mexicanstate, international health organizations, andMexican civil society, focusing on the ups anddowns of malaria eradication efforts between1955 and 1975. On the other hand, it aims atilluminating “the recurrent patterns of sanitarybackwardness and suggest[ing] what might bedone to make a real difference from the past” (p.xi). Marcos Cueto’s book emphasizes the ColdWar years—a period only marginally discussedin the historiography on Latin American publichealth—and centers its focus on the complexfabric woven by high-level politics and every-868 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 99 : 4 (2008)This content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Fri, 5 Sep 2014 13:44:50 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditionsday life—a very difficult and not much studieddimension.Cold War, Deadly Fevers first examines theemergence—in a context of diplomatic strug-gles, national security concerns, and altruisticvisions—of the humanitarian, economic, andpolitical motivations displayed by bilateral andmultilateral agencies involved in the eradicationcampaign. This involvement had three main as-sumptions: that eradication was biologically fea-sible, that it yielded more benefits than costs—particularly when compared with other forms ofintervention, such as malaria control—and thatgovernment political commitment was possible.The discussion of this first topic closes with anexploration of some of the reasons for the late1960s decline in the global commitment to erad-ication—not only the concern that DDT wasresponsible for environmental contamination,but also the perception that it was both a way todelay death without really improving health anda factor leading to overpopulation.The second topic exhaustively discussed in thebook is the Mexican government’s validation ofthe malaria eradication campaign and its appropri-ation by local medical personnel. This processtook place in a period when authoritarian regimesand pro-business political leaders were particularlyinterested in developing capital-intensive agricul-ture and also in expanding public health servicesto some rural areas. As part of these efforts, theMexican government used the mass media in itspublic health education campaign, and local med-ical personnel appropriated some of the specificelements of the international campaign while uti-lizing them as a way to further rural sanitation.The third topic deals with two local responsesto the eradication campaign. One of them wasarticulated by medical anthropologists and localphysicians, who emphasized campaign officials’lack of cultural perspective. As might be ex-pected, this criticism underlined the fact thatWestern medicine aimed at overcoming ordi-nary people’s resistance to eradication strategiesby trying to replace what looked like the prod-ucts of ignorance and the remnants of traditionalmedical practices. The other response, studied inless depth, is an indigenous revolt, based insouthern Mexico, that, according to Cueto, re-affirmed the inability of the campaign to dealwith cultural differences.At times Cold War, Deadly Fevers reads likea public health report. This is particularly appar-ent in the chapter of conclusions, organizedaround a number of lessons the Mexican casecan offer for malaria eradication efforts that arebased on vertical health programs—not only inthe interpretation of other cases in the past, butalso for current initiatives or those that might beimplemented in the future. These lessons under-line a number of issues. The first is the need toavoid the usual assumption that tactics that weresuccessful in a specific region can be appliedeffectively anywhere or everywhere. The secondis the conviction that malaria and other infec-tious diseases are not only natural realities, re-quiring adequate technological solutions, butalso socially and economically sustained reali-ties that call for social, political, and culturalresponses. The third is the necessity of takingpast public health experiences into accountwhen national or international agencies launchnew programs. The fourth is the need to avoidoveremphasizing new technologies as magic so-lutions, with insufficient attention paid to thestrengthening of community-based malaria pre-vention and management initiatives. Connectedto this lesson is the further point that both thegeneral population and, often, the elites had, andcontinue to have, a limited understanding ofpublic health—namely, as efforts mobilized intemporary and partial responses to emergen-cies.The book has a very clear narrative and or-ganization, with well-defined key topics dis-cussed in 160 pages of text and 100 of notes. Asa history of malaria eradication efforts it is veryconvincing; and the experience of the two de-cades Cueto has analyzed for the Mexican casereinforces some of the issues that have beendiscussed for other countries but in earlier peri-ods. Among them are the dynamic negotia-tions—not merely subordination—that tookplace when external players articulated theiragendas with the local ones and the renewed andexpanded approaches that could result, some-times addressing issues in a more ambitiousfashion than originally defined by expert voicesfrom the international health field. As a socio-cultural history of malaria in Mexico, the book’sbalance is perhaps less convincing, in part be-cause that dimension requires the use of differ-ent sources, in part because Cueto’s aim wasmainly to write a history of and in public health.Without doubt, Cold War, Deadly Fevers is animportant contribution to the expanding field ofinternational health history.DIEGO ARMUSJames Elkins. Six Stories from the End of Rep-resentation: Images in Painting, Photography,Astronomy, Microscopy, Particle Physics, andBOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 99 : 4 (2008) 869This content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Fri, 5 Sep 2014 13:44:50 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Review Of  Cold War, Deadly Fevers: Malaria Eradication In Mexico, 1955-1975  By M. Cueto

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Review Of Cold War, Deadly Fevers: Malaria Eradication In Mexico, 1955-1975 By M. Cueto

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