This book provides a clear, broad, and provocative synthesis of the history of Latin American medicine.

Colombia is the fourth largest country in South America and one of the continent's most populous nations. It has substantial oil reserves and is a major producer of gold, silver, emeralds, platinum, and coal, along with a significant number of natural resources. Colombia has also been ravaged by a decades-long violent conflict involving outlawed armed groups, drug cartels, and gross violations of human rights. Recently the country has made some progress towards improving security, and President Santos has pledged to continue to improve security by passing laws to strengthen the judicial system; a reform of the manner of distributing royalties paid by mining and petroleum companies; and a tougher law against corruption. The Historical Dictionary of Colombia covers the history of Colombia through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and a bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1,000 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Colombia.

Treats in concise and objective manner the dominant historical, social, political, economic, and national security aspects of contemporary Colombia. Chapter bibliographies appear at the end of the book.

This new book tells the story of Miguel Perdomo Niera, a healer whose amazing cures during his travels through the northern Andes in the 1860s and 1870s evoked both enormous hostility and widespread adulation. A combination of narrative and analysis, the book documents Perdomo's experiences in Colombia and Ecuador and offers valuable insights into the social history of medicine during the Great Transformation in nineteenth-century Latin America. Reactions to Perdomo also illuminate the conflicts between colonial and modern and between religious and secular belief systems in Latin America during this time. This era pitted the norms of colonial Latin America against forces of change that shaped contemporary Latin America. Perdomo's practice of medicine demonstrated a strong religious influence that liberals thought were incompatible with a modern, secular society. Seldom have the contentions surrounding competitive medical systems been so starkly illuminated as in the case of Perdomo. One of a group of empirics, also known as cranderos, bleeders or barbers, who offered health care to people in Latin America, Perdomo did not charge for his services. Many people were perplexed by his cures. The drugs that he used allegedly enabled him to perform minor surgery without pain, swelling, or excessive bleeding. Supporters wrote numerous testimonials expressing their gratitude for his ability to cure illnesses that had plagued them for years. But Perdomo also had his detractors. Physicians, formally trained medicos, and those who supported scientific modernization were critical of Perdomo's practice of Hispanic medicine, even though it was part of the medical system of the day. Blending Catholic healing beliefs with indigenous and African medical ideologies, Hispanic medicine challenged the innovations occurring in the professional medical community. This volume also makes a singular contribution to a scholarly understanding of the emergence of medical pluralism, tracking the submergence of traditional

A Fervent Crusade for the National Soul examines the implementation of cultural policies in relation to the contested configuration of citizenship in Colombia between 1930 and 1946. At a time when national identities were re-imagined all over the Americas, progressive artists and intellectuals affiliated with the liberal governments that ruled Colombia established an unprecedented bureaucratic apparatus for cultural intervention that celebrated so-called “popular culture” and rendered culture a social right. This book challenges pervasive narratives of state failure in Colombia, attending to the confrontations, negotiations, and entanglements of bureaucrats with everyday citizens that shaped the relationship between the ruler and the ruled. Catalina Muñoz argues that while culture became an instrument of inclusion, the liberal definition of popular culture as authentic and static was also a tool for domination that reinforced enduring structures of inequality founded on region, race, and gender. Liberals crafted the state as the paternalistic protector of acquiescent citizens, instead of a warden of political participation. Muñoz suggests that this form of governance allowed the elites to rule without making the structural changes required to craft a more equal society.