The History of Science in Latin America and the Caribbean Digital Archive is an exciting contribution to the growing field it represents and to the digital archive enterprise more broadly. A US National Science Foundation funded project under the supervision of Julia E. Rodriguez at the University of New Hampshire, the website, launched in January 2010, now contains over 200 primary sources representing media as diverse as videos, maps, cartoons, images and text documents of various kinds. The chronological, thematic and geographical scope of the material is equally ambitious. Many topics – among them ‘Scientific Expeditions’, ‘Slavery and Science’, and ‘Museums and Collections’ – roam heterogeneously across several centuries and continents. With thirty topics and seven to eight items per topic, the coverage is vast indeed.
The introduction to the site highlights unifying themes within the collection. These include: the ‘richness and diversity of experience’ within the Latin American and Caribbean scientific context; knowledge production as the result of a sometimes coercive and violent ‘cross-cultural and international engagement’; and a more holistic vision of science incorporating the role of ‘native and local actors’ in the ‘construction, interpretation, and application of scientific knowledge’. These thematic convergences also characterise current historical and historiographical work on the history of science and medicine in the region. The introductory remarks accompanying these topics provide useful framing in line with the overarching thematic commonalities, but they are mostly brief and unobtrusive, leaving ample room and flexibility to explore. Each topical section benefits from a helpful review essay with ‘Questions for future exploration’ and recommendations for further reading. A more extensive bibliography incorporating websites, textual publications, films and more is also available as a separate tab on each topic. Finally, there are the primary sources themselves, each of which is contextualised by a short ‘Introduction’ with its own set of references for further research.
Some of these sources are true gems that non-specialist viewers would be unlikely to encounter in any other setting. A ‘Table of Whitening’ reproduced from a 1905 guidebook for Brazil will undoubtedly intrigue many visitors to the site, with its projection that Brazil would be eighty per cent white by 2012 with zero citizens of African descent (from 44% white, 12% ‘negro’, 12% ‘Indian’, and 32% ‘half-breed’ according to an 1890 tabulation). In the past few decades, eugenics and national whitening projects have been a fruitful area of historical enquiry, uniting the political, social and cultural history of post-emancipation societies with the history of genetics and scientific racism. The source perfectly reflects the complexity of that history. A 1945 US film on the ‘Silent War’ against yellow fever as it played out in Colombia is equally rich. The video’s assertion of heroic hemispheric solidarity dovetails closely with the broader political imperatives of the World War II period to forge alliances with Latin American nations against European fascism. Meanwhile, the racial assumptions of the film, with white doctors ‘lionized as heroes “bringing blessed medicine” to a grateful people’, point to the limitations of that solidarity.
Other fascinating sources, however, could benefit from a more interventionist framing. Take, for instance, the 1847 ‘Carta de Darwin’ [‘Letter from Darwin’] to the Argentine physician and paleontologist Francisco Javier Muñiz. The introductory remarks, which provide helpful information about science and nation-formation, note that Darwin’s letter ‘expresses his admiration for the Argentine’s “zeal” for natural history’ and also thanks his correspondent for information he had sent to him. Nevertheless, the viewer who is unable to read Spanish (and thus the original letter, as no translation is provided) would not be aware that the letter also contains Darwin’s more equivocal judgments regarding compensation for the fossils Muñiz wished to send him or Muñiz’s request that Darwin translate and publish some of his work in a scientific journal (interesting elements in their own right).
In addition, the earlier images in the Archive may prove difficult for some visitors to interpret, as a more complete understanding depends on the viewer’s ability to decipher visual codes and artistic choices. While the Archive naturally privileges broad historical over artistic context, many of these earlier images require such information in order to be intelligible, let alone meaningful (one thinks of the Theodor de Bry engravings, in particular). Navigability and legibility of the site would also be improved by the incorporation of other organisational axes, especially geographic and chronological ones, in addition to cross-referencing for images that belong in multiple categories.
A project of this magnitude is bound to evolve and grow over time. It is easy to ask too much of such an ambitious Archive, which incorporates ancient through contemporary sources from a region composed of nearly fifty nations, territories and dependencies with widely divergent individual histories. As it now stands, the Archive is a one-of-a-kind resource that will prove to be an essential tool for instructors of survey, comparative and specialised courses on many topics, certainly not limited to Latin American and Caribbean history. It also represents an invaluable mechanism that can be used to teach students to assess primary sources in light of historical and contextual information. Rodriguez should be heartily commended for her efforts to open up historical scholarship on the history of science and medicine in Latin American and the Caribbean to a broader audience. In a relatively incipient field for which few such archives and compilations of primary documents are available, the HOSLAC Archive will likely be the definitive source for years to come.
