Stories in the Time of Cholera

Racial Profiling During a Medical Nightmare

Author: Charles L. Briggs
Secondary Author: Clara Mantini-Briggs
ISBN: 9780520243880

Cholera, although it can kill an adult through dehydration in half a day, is easily treated. Yet in 1992-93, some five hundred people died from cholera in the Orinoco Delta of eastern Venezuela. In some communities, a third of the adults died in a single night, as anthropologist Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs, a Venezuelan public health physician, reveal in their frontline report. Why, they ask in this moving and thought-provoking account, did so many die near the end of the twentieth century from a bacterial infection associated with the premodern past? It was evident that the number of deaths resulted not only from inadequacies in medical services but also from the failure of public health officials to inform residents that cholera was likely to arrive. Less evident were the ways that scientists, officials, and politicians connected representations of infectious diseases with images of social inequality. In Venezuela, cholera was racialized as officials used anthropological

Publisher: University of California Press
Publish Date: 2003

Subjects: History / Latin America / South America, Medical / Infectious Diseases, Social Science / Minority Studies

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Raza Recource Centro (Location: Wall A, Shelf 4)