scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question
Author

Steven Palmer

Bio: Steven Palmer is an academic researcher from University of Windsor. The author has contributed to research in topics: Public health & Latin Americans. The author has an hindex of 12, co-authored 48 publications receiving 436 citations. Previous affiliations of Steven Palmer include University of Costa Rica & Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Papers
More filters
Book
14 May 2010
TL;DR: In this article, an in-depth look at the Rockefeller Foundation's earliest ventures in international health is presented, focusing on the hookworm campaigns in British Guiana, Costa Rica, Trinidad, and Guatemala.
Abstract: This is an in-depth look at the Rockefeller Foundation's earliest ventures in international health. From the Rockefeller Foundation to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, U.S. philanthropies have played a leading role in the evolution of international health. "Launching Global Health" is about the Rockefeller Foundation's very first initiative abroad. The foundation's flagship, the International Health Board, made its first call in British Guiana in March 1914 to experiment with its new 'American Method' for the treatment of hookworm disease. Within months the agency was involved in ambitious hookworm programs in six Central American and Caribbean sites, its directors self-consciously choosing to test-run the prototype for their global project in the nearest and clearest domain of American imperial influence. This book examines the nature and evolution of those hookworm campaigns in British Guiana, Costa Rica, Trinidad, and Guatemala, as well as relevant evidence from Nicaragua and Panama. The study takes into account the late 19th-century backdrop and considers events through to about 1930 when most of the International Health Board hookworm campaigns had evolved into public health projects of a different nature.

68 citations

Book
01 Jan 2003
TL;DR: From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism demonstrates that it was through everyday acts of negotiation among agents of the state, medical professionals, and popular practitioners that the contours of Costa Rica's modern, heterogeneous health care system were established.
Abstract: "From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism" presents the history of medical practice in Costa Rica from the late colonial era - when none of the fifty thousand inhabitants had access to a titled physician, pharmacist, or midwife - to the 1940s, when the figure of the qualified medical doctor was part of everyday life for many of Costa Rica's nearly one million citizens. It is the first book to chronicle the history of all healers, both professional and popular, in a Latin American country during the national period. Steven Palmer breaks with the view of popular and professional medicine as polar opposites-where popular medicine is seen as representative of the authentic local community and as synonymous with oral tradition and religious and magical beliefs and professional medicine as advancing neocolonial interests through the work of secular, trained academicians.Arguing that there was significant and formative overlap between these two forms of medicine, Palmer shows that the relationship between practitioners of each was marked by coexistence, complementarity, and dialogue as often as it was by rivalry. Palmer explains that while the professionalisation of medical practice was intricately connected to the nation-building process, the Costa Rican state never consistently displayed an interest in suppressing the practice of popular medicine.In fact, it persistently found both tacit and explicit ways to allow untitled healers to practice. Using empirical and archival research to bring people (such as the famous healer or curandero Professor Carlos Carbell), events, and institutions (including the Rockefeller Foundation) to life, "From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism" demonstrates that it was through everyday acts of negotiation among agents of the state, medical professionals, and popular practitioners that the contours of Costa Rica's modern, heterogeneous health care system were established.

39 citations

Book
15 Dec 2014
TL;DR: This chapter discusses primary health care, neoliberal response, and global health in Latin America, and the role of indigenous medicine, official health, and medical pluralism in the twentieth century.
Abstract: Despite several studies on the social, cultural, and political histories of medicine and of public health in different parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, local and national focuses still predominate, and there are few panoramic studies that analyze the overarching tendencies in the development of health in the region. This comprehensive book summarizes the social history of medicine, medical education, and public health in Latin America and places it in dialogue with the international historiographical currents in medicine and health. Ultimately, this text provides a clear, broad, and provocative synthesis of the history of Latin American medical developments while illuminating the recent challenges of global health in the region and other developing countries.

38 citations

Book
01 Jan 1998

34 citations

Book
01 Jan 2004
TL;DR: I Birth of an exception II Coffee nation III Popular culture and social policy IV Democratic enigma V The Costa Rica dream VI Other cultures and outer reaches VII Working paradise VIII Tropical soundings
Abstract: I Birth of an exception II Coffee nation III Popular culture and social policy IV Democratic enigma V The Costa Rica dream VI Other cultures and outer reaches VII Working paradise VIII Tropical soundings

28 citations


Cited by
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The purpose is to show how transnational and transimperial approaches are vital to understanding some of the key issues with which historians of health, disease, and medicine are concerned and to show what can be gained from taking a broader perspective.
Abstract: The emergence of global history has been one of the more notable features of academic history over the past three decades. Although historians of disease were among the pioneers of one of its earlier incarnations—world history—the recent “global turn” has made relatively little impact on histories of health, disease, and medicine. Most continue to be framed by familiar entities such as the colony or nation-state or are confined to particular medical “traditions.” This article aims to show what can be gained from taking a broader perspective. Its purpose is not to replace other ways of seeing or to write a new “grand narrative” but to show how transnational and transimperial approaches are vital to understanding some of the key issues with which historians of health, disease, and medicine are concerned. Moving on from an analysis of earlier periods of integration, the article offers some reflections on our own era of globalization and on the emerging field of global health.

1,334 citations

MonographDOI
01 Jun 2015
TL;DR: State Building in Latin America diverges from existing scholarship in developing explanations both for why state-building efforts in the region emerged and for their success or failure as mentioned in this paper, and the second plank of the book's argument centers on strategies of bureaucratic appointment to explain this variation.
Abstract: State Building in Latin America diverges from existing scholarship in developing explanations both for why state-building efforts in the region emerged and for their success or failure. First, Latin American state leaders chose to attempt concerted state-building only where they saw it as the means to political order and economic development. Fragmented regionalism led to the adoption of more laissez-faire ideas and the rejection of state-building. With dominant urban centers, developmentalist ideas and state-building efforts took hold, but not all state-building projects succeeded. The second plank of the book's argument centers on strategies of bureaucratic appointment to explain this variation. Filling administrative ranks with local elites caused even concerted state-building efforts to flounder, while appointing outsiders to serve as administrators underpinned success. Relying on extensive archival evidence, the book traces how these factors shaped the differential development of education, taxation, and conscription in Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.

214 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: It is argued that Brazil’s governance of the COVID-19 pandemic can best be described as governance without (central) government, and what this collapse of public health reveals about the limitations of democratic governance in the age of Bolsonaro is reflected.
Abstract: Brazil's governance of the COVID-19 pandemic has been described as nothing short of tragic by several commentators. President Jair Bolsonaro's dangerous brew of neoliberal authoritarianism, science denialism and ableism has plunged this country into catastrophe. In this article we argue that this form (or lack) of public health governance can best be described as governance without (central) government. We begin with an overview of public health governance in the country before introducing the main theoretical concepts that guide our analysis, namely the notions of 'government by exception' and 'strategic ignorance'. Finally, we sketch the main features of this emerging form of (non)governance of COVID-19. We highlight the new forms of solidarity and mutual aid that have emerged in favelas and Indigenous communities, which have stepped in to fill the void left by a limited federal presence. The article concludes by reflecting on what this collapse of public health reveals about the limitations of democratic governance in the age of Bolsonaro.

204 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Nov 2014
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors compare the goals, objectives, principles, modus operandi, and agenda-setting roles of the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations in their historical contexts and conclude that the Gates Foundation's pervasive influence is nonetheless of grave concern both to democratic global health governance and to scientific independence.
Abstract: In recent years the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has emerged as this era's most renowned, and argu- ably its most influential, global health player. A century ago, the Rockefeller Foundation—likewise founded by the richest, most ruthless and innovative capitalist of his day—was an even more powerful international health actor. This article reflects critically on the roots, exigencies, and reach of global health philanthropy, comparing the goals, para- digms, principles, modus operandi, and agenda-setting roles of the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations in their historical contexts. It proposes that the Rockefeller Foundation's early 20th century initia- tives had a greater bearing on interna- tional health when the field was wide open—in a world order characterized by forceful European and ascendant U.S. imperialism—than do the Gates Foundation's current global health efforts amidst neoliberal globalization and fad- ing U.S. hegemony. It concludes that the Gates Foundation's pervasive influence is nonetheless of grave concern both to democratic global health governance and to scientific independence—and urges scientists to play a role in contest- ing and identifying alternatives to global health philanthrocapitalism. INTRODUCTION International health philanthropy, American-style, is back. Almost exactly a century after the Rockefeller Foundation began to use John D. Rockefeller's colossal oil profits to stake a preeminent role in shaping the institutions, ideologies, and practices of international health (as well as medi- cine, education, social sciences, agri- culture, and science), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has emerged as the current era's most influential global health (and education, develop- ment, and agriculture) agenda-setter. The high profile of its eponymous soft - ware magnate founder and his wife, cou- pled with the Foundation's big-stakes ap- proach to grant-making and "partnering," has made it a de facto leader in the global health field. Each of these two uber-powerful foun- dations emerged at a critical juncture in the history of international/global health. Each was started by the richest, most ruthless and innovative capitalist of his day

152 citations