Panic, denial, and the search for "magic remedies:" the various social responses to covid-19 in Peru.

Between March 2020 and March 2022, more than 213,000 Peruvians died of covid-19. In this research note, we will identify and analyze the various social responses to covid-19 in Peru: denial, panic, search for culprits, search for "magic remedies," and, in some sectors, mistrust towards the State and science. We argue that these social responses have been common throughout history, both in pandemics prior to the development of the bacteriological era and in the most recent ones.

[Covid-19 in Peru: state and social responses].

Despite efforts by the Peruvian state to contain the outbreak and spread of covid-19, including a strict nationwide quarantine for more than one hundred days, Peru had one of the highest numbers of cases and deaths in the world due to the pandemic. The pandemic highlighted the precariousness of the health care system, work, living conditions and transport. The pandemic also demonstrated that until underlying problems in the country's social and economic system are solved (such as inequality and poverty), the health sector can do little to combat a health care crisis.

For the good of the nation: scientific discourses endorsing the medicalization of childbirth in Peru, 1900-1940.

Over the course of the twentieth century, a series of changes occurred in the understanding of childbirth, which went from being a natural reproductive phenomenon belonging to the female, domestic sphere to a professional medical matter handled in an institutional setting. Through procedures like the use of anesthesia, Cesarean sections, ultrasound and other techno-scientific interventions, rapid and significant improvements and changes took place in the health and life of society and of women. The medicalization of childbirth in the early twentieth century was part of a broader process of constructing the state and institutionalizing the patriarchy that was common throughout the region.

British medicine in the Peruvian Andes: the travels of Archibald Smith M.D. (1820-1870).

This article traces the travels of the Scottish physician Archibald Smith through the Peruvian Andes between the 1820s and 1860s. Despite his prominent role in the nineteenth-century Peruvian medical scene, almost nothing has been written on Archibald Smith. By exploring Smith's medical activities, publications, and debates, this article intends to uncover unexplored areas of Peruvian medical history, such as the animosity between local and foreign physicians during the post-Independence war era and the important role played by medical geography as a scientific discipline for redefining ethnical and regional issues.