International health, the early cold war and Latin America

Abstract

This article offers a panoramic vision of the development of international health in Latin America during the late 1940s and the 1950s, when a series of bilateral and multilateral institutions, such as the World Health Organization and UNICEF, were founded and reshaped. The language, policies, and activities of these new institutional actors were heavily influenced by the context of the early Cold War between the era's superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. Vertical campaigns against yaws and malaria--implemented under the leadership of Fred L. Soper, director of the Pan American Sanitary Bureau--symbolized international health's technical orientation, as well as its contribution to the modernization of the countries of the region. The Cold War period has received little attention by historians of medicine, though it bears certain similarities to historiographical discussions of the relationship between tropical medicine and imperialism in the early 20th century.