History of Chagas Disease: Science and Health in Brazil

Please join the Bullitt History of Medicine Club for its November lecture:

 Title: History of Chagas Disease: Science and Health in Brazil

Speaker: Simone Kropf

Professor of History of Sciences and Health, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation

Registration link: https://unc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_UuFB5v3ZSoepiFQVfMjSaQ

Lecture information: This lecture will explore the history of Chagas disease (American trypanosomiasis), discovered by the physician Carlos Chagas in 1909 in a poor, rural area of Brazil.

The talk will focus on studies and debates on Chagas disease as a medical and social problem connected to poor health conditions of the rural population and considered to be an obstacle to Brazil’s project of modernization. It will also address the controversies about clinical and epidemiological aspects of the disease, in a context of intense nationalism and disagreements about the political meanings of the so-called tropical diseases. This is a case that sheds light on relationships between science, health and society in specific historical contexts.

Speaker information: Simone P. Kropf holds a Ph.D. in history from the Universidade Federal Fluminense, in Brazil, and is a professor at the graduate program of the history of sciences and health at Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Rio de Janeiro. She was a visiting scholar at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS) at the University of Michigan 2017-2018. She has written about the history of biomedical sciences in Brazil in the20th century (particularly regarding tropical medicine and Chagas disease); the history of cardiology; and the history of scientific and cultural relations between the United States and Brazil in the 1930s and 1940s.

About the Bullitt History of Medicine Club

Formed in 1953, the Bullitt History of Medicine Club is a student organization within the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Medicine. The club promotes the understanding and appreciation of the historical foundations upon which current medical knowledge and practice is constructed, by encouraging social and intellectual exchanges between faculty members, medical students, and members of the community. Please visit the Bullitt History of Medicine Club website for more information.