Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the formation of medical knowledge on venereal disease in Peru in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the formation of medical knowledge on venereal disease in Peru in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this particularl Peruvian periphery of VD research, there was little 'scientific excellence' of the sort that Marcos Cueto and others have identified in the context of other fields of biomedical research and of other peripheries. But a close analysis of VD research in Peru shows that Peruvian physicians were actively involved in research, in touch with developments in VD research elsewhere, and no less receptive to such developments than their counterparts in the biomedical core. Of course, in Peru as elsewhere, biomedical attention on VD overlapped with a broader, non-medical, preoccupation with gonorrhoea and particularly with syphilis. Like few other diseases, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries commentators connected VD to anxieties over aberrant sexual behaviour and social and racial degeneration in a broader context of perceived uncontrolled, and possibly uncontrollable, social and political change. At the same time, VD emerged as a field in which policy makers, in alliance with physicians, could play a key role in moral and social governance. However, as Davidson and Hall note in their survey of the historiography of VD in Europe, "responses to VD have always been powerfully inflected by local and historical contingencies". In Peru, I argue in this paper, the making of medical knowledge on venereal disease was intimately tied to doctors' racialized understandings of the character of the Peruvian population, and particularly of its non-white population.