Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru ─ Population Growth and the Bourbon Reforms

"Adam Warren uses debates over vaccinations and disease in late colonial Peru to shed light not only on ideas about the body and death but also on the Bourbon Reforms and trans-Atlantic ideas in the age of the Enlightenment. Moving as it does from the microbe to the macro, Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru clears new paths in research about medicine and colonialism and deserves a broad audience."-Charles F. Walker, Director, Hemispheric Institute On The Americas, University Of California, Davis

"Provides a fresh look at the Bourbon period through the history of medicine, healing, and health policy in colonial Peru and the goal of 'growing the colony' during the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. It is one of the few works that examines the colonial origins of modern medical systems in Latin America."-Martha Few, University Of Arizona

By the eighteenth century, Peru had witnessed the decline of its silver industry and massive population losses due to smallpox and other diseases. It was widely believed toward the century's end that economic salvation was contingent upon increasing the labor force and maintaining as many healthy workers as possible. In Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru, Adam Warren presents a groundbreaking study of the primacy placed on medical care to generate population growth during this period.

The Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century shaped many of the political, economic, and social interests of Spain and its colonies. In Peru, local elites saw the reforms as an opportunity to positively transform society and its conceptions of medicine and medical institutions. Creole physicians, in particular, took advantage of Bourbon reforms to wrest control of medical treatment away from the Catholic Church, establish their own Medical expertise, and create a new, secular medical culture. But during the early years of independence, the doctors lost much of their influence, and medical reforms ground to a halt. As Warren's study reveals, despite falling in and out of political favor, Bourbon reforms and Creole physicians were instrumental to the founding of modern medicine in Peru.

Adam Warren is assistant professor of history at the University of Washington.