Chagas Disease : History of a Continent's Scourge Hardback

by Francois Delaporte

Part of the Forms of Living series

Hardback

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Description

FranÃ§ois Delaporteâ€™s Chagas Disease chronicles Brazilian medicineâ€™s encounter with a disease, an insect, and a history of discovery.

Between 1909 and 1911, Carlos Chagas described an infection (pathogenic trypanosome), its intermediate host, and the illness that he believed it caused, parasitic thyroiditis.

Chagasâ€™s work did not lack significance: the disease that came to share his name would be one of Latin Americaâ€™s most serious endemic diseases.

However, the clinical identification of the disease through â€œRomaÃ±aâ€™s signâ€ (a palpebral edema or swelling of the eyelid) some decades later marked a transformation in the general medical knowledge of the disease and its basis altogether.

Not only was the disease entity that Chagas had described shown to be a nosological illusion, but twenty-five years of scientific controversy turned out to have been based on a misunderstanding.

The continued use of the term â€œChagasâ€™s Diseaseâ€ even after Cecilio RomaÃ±aâ€™s discovery thus refers to a fundamental ambiguity.

Delaporte dispels this ambiguity by re-examining the various discoveries, dead ends, controversies, and major epistemological transformations that marked the history of the diseaseâ€“â€“a history that begins with the creation of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio de Janeiro and ends in the forests of Santa Fe in northern Argentina.

Delaporteâ€™s study shows how an epistemological focus can add depth to the history of medicine and complexity to accounts of scientific discovery.