Covid-19 as an issue of memory, truth, and justice: an interview with Deisy Ventura.

This interview with Deisy Ventura, professor at the Faculty of Public Health of the Universidade de São Paulo, discusses the political dimension of the covid-19 pandemic in Brazil. She has become a leading reference on the subject due to her extensive knowledge of international law, with a focus on health. In this interview, Deisy Ventura offers some reflections on global health and discusses the handling of the pandemic in Brazil and its human rights implications.

[Social cooperation and therapeutic offers in the fight against tuberculosis in Mexico City, the 1940s decade].

The determined and systematic participation of civil society in the fight against tuberculosis in Mexico began in 1939 when the National Committee for the Fight against Tuberculosis was created. Its plural conformation and tasks distinguished it from the anti-tuberculosis associations and leagues created in previous decades in different countries of the Americas. This article will present a first approach to the plural conformation of this organism and will study some of the actions that it promoted during its first decade of operation, in which the coexistence of different therapeutics to treat individuals was also particularly prolific with that disease.

[History in pandemic times: covid-19 in Latin America].

Having as a framework the tragic presence of covid-19, historians from Mexico, Argentina and Brazil reflect in this text on the context of the pandemic as well as its relationship with institutional sanitary precariousness, persistent stigmas and past social inequalities. Their interventions are a preliminary record of the impact of the pandemic on their countries. They are based on interventions presented at the session "História em tempos pandêmicos: reflexões sobre um ano de crises", held in June 2021, moderated by Marcos Cueto and organized by the Departamento de Pesquisa em História das Ciências e da Saúde of the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, Fiocruz.

[Doctors, nurses and patients: dealing with contradictions, uncertainty and shortages during covid-19 in Mexico].

The covid-19 pandemic revealed the innumerable shortages that have characterized the nation's inequitable and fragmentary health care system for decades. The main goal of the following reflections is to outline the precarity of working conditions for health care personnel in Mexico, as well as the contradictory statements issued as the epidemic developed in the country, a combination of factors that magnified uncertainty about the new disease and how to deal with it.

[The road from the "antituberculosis armory" to the Huipulco Tuberculosis Sanatorium in Mexico City, 1920-1940].

This article discusses the various proposals and strategies to prevent the transmission of pulmonary tuberculosis in the City of Mexico from the 1920s decade onwards, when it was launched the first long-term campaign against the disease, and analyses the limitations and challenges faced until 1940. It looks upon the motives that led the need to contain the transmission of the disease to occupy a dominant role after ten years of civil war; it focuses on the models and strategies implemented, and examines the challenges faced by the construction and operation of the Huipulco Tuberculosis Sanatorium, a key component of the fight against tuberculosis at the international level since long ago.

Control, containment and health education in the smallpox-vaccination campaigns in Mexico in the 1940s.

This article examines some of the changes that the Mexican vaccination programs underwent starting in 1943, the year when the National Smallpox Campaign (Campaña Nacional contra la Viruela) was established. It analyzes why a uniform and coordinated vaccination method was adopted to counter the outbreaks of this endemic disease, especially in central Mexico; the actions of its numerous and heterogeneous staff; and the reasons why smallpox vaccination was considered critical to establish a culture of prevention. In summary, the article examines why selective vaccination was chosen and the expansion of the health-education programs, topics that have been seldom addressed in historical research.

[Strategies, actors, promises and fears in the smallpox vaccinations campaigns in Mexico: from the Porfiriato to the Post-revolution (1880-1940)].

The article examines some of the strategies employed by the Mexican health authorities that led to the organization of massive and obligatory smallpox vaccination campaigns from the late 1880s to the 1940s, a period of Mexican history that corresponds to the Porfirio Díaz regime (1877-1911), to the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), and to the first two decades of the Post-revolutionary governments (1920-1940). Attention will be placed of the vaccination programs in the main urban settings, notably in Mexico City, as well as the gradual but decisive organization and regulation of vaccination campaigns in the heterogeneous rural milieu. Furthermore, the importance that hygienic education acquired will be explored, as well as the divergent and contested responses that emerged due to the obligatory vaccination campaigns, responses that included resistance, fear, uncertainty and widespread acceptance.

[Itinerant physicians, the art of healing and doctors in national history (Mexico City, 1877-1911)].

The uncertainty and mistrust towards the presence and activities of academic medical practitioners in Mexico City during the Porfirio Díaz government (1877-1911) convinced these professionals that is was essential to create, strengthen and transmit a respectable, competent and homogeneous image of the profession. To this purpose they recovered, recreated and adapted the ethical maxims of the occidental medical culture to their professional work, and rescued eminent medical figures of Mexico's convulse nineteenth century from being lost in the oblivion of history. Their goal - as it will be expounded in the following pages - was to respond, oppose and neutralize the criticism and disbelief expressed by the public against their professional performance.

Popular health education and propaganda in times of peace and war in Mexico city, 1890s-1920s.

Health education and propaganda acquired importance during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Mexico City, as physicians, hygienists, and schoolteachers attempted to teach the principles of public health to a culturally and socially heterogeneous urban population.I explore the organization of the Popular Hygiene Exhibition of 1910 and the importance of health education before and after the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution, and why children and the indigenous populations became the main recipients of health education programs.