A History of Health and Disease in Puerto Rico, 1898-1940

FAIN: FA-52137-05

Blanca G. Silvestrini
University of Connecticut (Storrs, CT 06269-9000)

This project focuses on the alternative ways in which scientific knowledge about health and disease was transmitted and transformed into vernacular conceptions of everyday life in a colonial setting by looking into the cultural change that surrounds the American occupation of Puerto Rico (1898-1940). In this process gender was central to forge a new experimental landscape of American modernity. Based on extensive archival research both in Puerto Rican and American repositories, the project illuminates the multiple ways in which ideas of health and disease were recast and appropriated in the new Caribbean tropics of the first part of the twentieth century.