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This article explores the medical conceptualization of the causes of diseases in nineteenth-century Colombia. It traces the history of some of the pathologies that were of major concern among nineteenth-century doctors: periodic fevers (yellow fever and malaria), continuous fevers (typhoid fever), and leprosy (Greek elephantiasis). By comparing the transforming conceptualizations of these diseases, this article shows that their changing pattern, the idea of climatic determinism of diseases (neo-Hippocratism and medical geography), the weak standing of the medical community in Colombian society, as well as Pasteurian germ practices were all crucial in the uneven and varied reshaping of their understanding.

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The resort towns created in the early 1900s are prime objects for studying the relationship between public health policies and urban and social development. This article analyzes the social and institutional vectors involved in the creation of the resort town of Campos do Jordão from the perspective of the career and works of physician, geographer and businessman Domingos Nogueira Jaguaribe Filho. Geographical studies, medical knowledge and the precepts of urbanization combined with private and development interests in the symbolism and concrete manifestation of the "Brazilian Switzerland".

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This paper analyses how the Colombian medical elites made sense of typhoid fever before and during the inception of bacteriological ideas and practices in the second half of the nineteenth century. Assuming that the identity of typhoid fever has to be understood within the broader concerns of the medical community in question, I show how doctors first identified Bogotá's epidemics as typhoid fever during the 1850s, and how they also attached specificity to the fever amongst other continuous fevers, such as its European and North American counterparts. I also found that, in contrast with the discussions amongst their colleagues from other countries, debates about typhoid fever in 1860-70 among doctors in Colombia were framed within the medico-geographical scheme and strongly shaped by the fear of typhoid fever appearing alongside 'paludic' fevers in the highlands. By arguing in medico-geographical and clinical terms that typhoid fever had specificity in Colombia, and by denying the medico-geographical law of antagonism between typhoid and paludic fevers proposed by the Frenchman Charles Boudin, Colombian doctors managed to question European knowledge and claimed that typhoid fever had distinct features in Colombia. The focus on paludic and typhoid fevers in the highlands might explain why the bacteriological aetiology of typhoid fever was ignored and even contested during the 1880s. Anti-Pasteurian arguments were raised against its germ identity and some physicians even supported the idea of spontaneous origin of the disease. By the 1890s, Pasteurian knowledge had come to shape clinical and hygienic practices.

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This article attempts a fresh analysis of the supposed ornamental nature of medical institutions in Imperial Brazil (1822-1889). The institutions in question were active in the production and validation of scientific knowledge relating to health both public and private in the Empire. In contrast to interpretations which explain medical and hygienic thinking in terms of the immediate interests of dominant elites —forging a medical conscience “from the outside”— the article seeks to highlight the socio-professional dynamics mobilised for the validation and control of medical knowledge according to the same standards of proof prevailing in European hygienic and anatoclinical thought. It is argued that the social position occupied by the Imperial Academy of Medicine was built on meritocratic criteria. It was not the titled nobility which accredited scientific opinion or evidence, but rather the ability to reason in accordance with established scientific standards.(AU)

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Se explica brevemente la significación de la Geografía al lado de la Medicina y se fundamenta la interdependencia existente entre ambas ciencias. Se describen las primeras comunicaciones sobre la Geografía Médica surgidas al nivel universal y los documentos que dieron inicio a la bibliografía cubana sobre esta disciplina. Se relacionan las obras más importantes escritas al respecto en Cuba a lo largo de los siglos XIX y XX, y se incluyen trabajos del doctor Carlos J. Finlay y artículos publicados en 2 de las revistas médicas cubanas más prestigiosas de todos los tiempos. Mediante este inventario bibliográfico se puede disponer de una referencia científicamente fundamentada acerca del surgimiento, evolución y desarrollo de la documentación científica nacional en el campo de la Geografía Médica(AU)

The significance of Geography side by side with Medicine is briefly explained and the interdependence existing between both sciences is defined. The first communications that appeared in the world about Medical Geography, as well as the documents that gave rise to the Cuban bibliography an this discipline are described. The most important works written in Cuba during the XIX and XX century are mentioned, including papers of Dr. Carlos J. Finlay and some articles published in two of the most prestigious Cuban medical journals of all times. With this bibliographic inventory it is possible to have a scientifically founded reference about the appareance, evolution and development of the national scientific documentation in the field of Medical Geography(AU)

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