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In Brazil, the focus in science was towards applied work with short-term practical results and the other academics. The scientific institutions created in the first years of the Republic focused primarily on applying their results to meet what were perceived as Brazil's most pressing needs: exploring the country's natural resources, expanding agriculture, and ridding the nation's main ports and cities of disease. The intellectual focus in Brazil did not incorporate long term research goals which are vital to the development of any nation into a world power.
The end of the 18th century represented the coming of the Enlightenment which spread through Europe and hit Latin America. It "represented the triumph of general acceptance of the modern progressive system of thought on which the new conception of Europe [but the problem in Latin America was a] rivalry between the old and the new [because] the new became identified with what was foreign, and the old, with the national" (Whitaker xi-xii). Brazil wasn't as responsive to the Enlightenment as other nations in Latin America. "Two general impressions may be derived from looking at [the] Enlightenment in Brazil. . .Contrary to the prevailing notion, there was an Enlightenment in Brazil. . .If the Enlightenment in Brazil is compared quantitatively with that in all of Spanish America, it appears small in quantity and, it would seem, poor in quality. If, on the other hand, the Enlightenment in Brazil is compared with the Enlightenment in particular regions of Spanish America (e.g. Mexico. . .), then Brazil takes on importance as the inferior of only a few and the equal of several regions of Spanish America" (115).
By the end of the 19th century, Brazil had embraced the concepts of biological and social Darwinism, positivism, and philosophical and political materialism. Brazil's political, cultural, and intellectual elites welcomed these ideas, each group accepting the aspect that suited it best. It was against political decentralization, imported cultural tendencies, and the desire for practical knowledge, for which Brazil entered the 20th century. The first indication of scientific commitment into the next millennium was the Observatorio Imperial (Imperial Observatory) in Rio de Janeiro, formally created in 1827 but active only since 1845.
Success in applied science was one of the major causes of the problems that pervaded most Brazilian scientific and technological institutions in the 1920s and 1930s and led first to the progressive concentration of competence in the state of Sao Paulo and later to the creation of Brazil's first higher education institutions with significant research functions. The Tropicalist school emerged in Brazil as a dynamic force but it failed to have long-lasting effects. Resourcefulness in designing experiments was perhaps the key to the best Latin American science of the period. Instead of being built on by later generations, the progress of the Tropicalist school was overshadowed by European medical ideas.
In France, positivism wasn't necessarily accepted by everyone. It was only accepted by some of the evolutionist philosophers but most natural scientists did not agree with its ideas. Within the physical sciences, positivism conflicted with the theoretical lines followed in physics since Alessandro Volta and Luigi Galvani revealing the existence of non-Newtonian forces after the 18th century. Positivism also ran up against a barrier within mathematical sciences, where work had been influenced by the studies on non-Euclidean geometry carried out by Carl Gauss, Nicolay Lobachevsky, and Georg Bernhard Riemann.
In the 1970s, the Multinational genetics Project of the Organization of American States facilitated research in human genetics in a number of countries by standardizing biochemical techniques important in medical genetic research. This was the origin of the biochemical genetics program in the institute of Human Genetics of the University of San Andres medical school in Bolivia. A new field of genetics evolved within Latin America, eugenics. "Eugenics, a socially constructed application of genetics, was, in part, the application of social Darwinian constructs in an attempt to preserve the predominance and 'racial purity' of whites, in countries where miscegenation was in evidence, and to encourage the immigration of socially favored groups in predominantly European countries. As in Europe, eugenics was an attempt to biologize social problems and propose 'scientific' solutions for them."
In the 1930s and 1940s, a group of physiologists performed high quality research in the Institute of Andean Biology. It was founded by Carlos Monge in 1934 and the work done by Monge and Hurrado provided a model for centers of Andean biology and medicine established later. Places where this foundation was important include the Institute of High-Altitude Pathology, in La Paz, Bolivia, and the Veterinary Institute of Tropical and High-Altitude Research of the University of San Marcos (Lima), founded in 1985.
Diffusion and reception of knowledge also depended on the presence of professional groups with the appropriate training. In Brazil, during the second empire and the first decade of the Republic, medicine was mostly clinical and sanitary. The focus was on correlating certain disease with soil, climate, and other environmental conditions. Physicians were consulted and gave opinions about the physical organization of cities, the opening of roads, the landfill marshes, the construction of sewers, and the basic regulations for private residences, schools, hospitals, and lodgings.
Modern bacteriological research and sanitary medicine started in Sao Paulo partly due to the educational, scientific, and technological initiatives in that state in the first years of the Republic. The first initiative was the creation of Sao Paulo's Instituto Vacinogenicao (Vaccine Institute) in 1892, which was to produce vaccines to protect the nation against repeated epidemics of smallpox. The law that eventually established the institute also provided for the organization of three different laboratories: one for clinical analyses, one for bacteriology, and a third for pharmaceutical research. Only the second of these became a reality. In 1894 and 1895 the institute responded rapidly and efficiently to cholera epidemics. The Instituto Bacteriologico, and Lutz in particular, were to gain special fame with the public health campaigns aimed at wiping out yellow fever and the bubonic plague. From its initial role as a factory of serum and vaccines, the institute rapidly broadened into a center for bacteriological research and personnel training and a gathering place for a new generation of medical doctors in tune with the medical revolution started by Pasteur. Originally entrusted solely with the manufacture of serum and vaccines, the institute assumed the character of a research center. Under its new statutes it enjoyed "total autonomy in its technical and scientific investigations" and could ask the government to send any of its staff members to various places to study relevant scientific questions. This program was a giant leap in Latin America towards respect in the scientific community
House-by-house vaccination as an approach to public health moved a state in the direction of a proactive role, though the class bias in imposing this form of medicalization was clear. This approach to public health was dependent on discrimination against the lower class, denying them rights to the privacy and freedom from state intrusion which elites so vigorously defended. This showed that Latin America still had some political woes ahead of it despite all of its advances.
There were physicians in Brazil, before the institutionalization of tropical medicine by the European colonial powers, who were actively engaged in an attempt to understand and define the idea of tropical disorders and to develop a distinctive Brazilian tradition in medicine. This was not only a quest for medical knowledge but an attempt to confront some of the problems of a new nation concerning whether its citizens could be healthy and whether "civilization" and progress were possible there. Believing that the role of the physician was to help Brazilians understand and prevent disease in their midst, they argued that Brazilian physicians should not wait for Europeans to show them the way but instead, using the scientific methods of European disseminated, must themselves decipher the problems of tropical diseases, problems that European doctors understood only superficially. Brazilian intellectuals took it upon themselves to invent their own regional "medicine".
Through the University, the state exercised control over entrance into the medical profession, improving the status of physicians through selectivity. However, the impact of this control was limited. Education and politics never fully separated or allowed to separate. These physicians of state-organized education did not guarantee loyalty to the state. Doctor recommendations contained an element of social control over the behavior and morality of lower classes. The politics behind these actions promoted social stratification among the Latin American people Public health measures such as this facilitated the imposition of a liberal social and timework ethic in the working classes. Rios thus sought to extend medical expertise into the engineering and administration of public education. Public health policy represented the growth of bureaucratic regulation of society as the central government attempted to assert its authority over local and regional interests more completely. The regulation of medical professionals by the state linked professionalization and bureaucratization. The Chilean case revealed increasing intrusions of state personnel into the social realm, justified by the public good, and enforced through the state's police powers. The justifications of these policies reveal both the deep roots of a powerful Executive in 19th century Chilean politics, and the early linkage drawn between the 'scientific discourses' of medical professionals and the bureaucratic centralization of state power.
Leaving the 20th century and embarking on a journey into the 21st century, many of the problems that plagued Latin America in the 18th and 19th century still plague it into this new millennium, including economic inferiority, political instability, and overbearing political figures. With all the struggles that Latin America has endured, there is still hope and Spanish America can be sure that one day they will step into the role of a superpower if they continue the struggle and think national goals versus letting other foreign interests invade and abuse Latin America's resources. For medicine, though, Latin America will have to continue to follow the lead of other nations until it can establish itself in the world of medicine which is nowadays preventive and general in scope to all the nations around the world. Medicine is not conducive to nationalistic idealism, Latin American people will suffer if this isn't understood.
Bibliography
Comte, Auguste. Republic of the West Order and Progress: A General View of Positivism.
Academic Reprints, Paris 1848.
Whitaker, Arthur. Latin America and the Enlightenment: Second Edition. Great Seal Books.
New York. 1961.
Woodward Jr., Ralph Lee. Positivism in Latin America, 1850-1900: Problems in Latin American
Cvilization. D.C. Heath and Company. Lexington 1971.