Historical aspects

To a large extent we can only infer what the health conditions were in Latin America in prehistoric and historical times. However, much can be learned through the careful examination of osseous or mummified remains, and written documents. Vargas (1990) gave information about epidemics that occurred in México during the Conquest and afterwards. He cited studies of E. Malvido, in which she listed 16 epidemics in the sixteenth, 27 in the seventeenth, and 17 in the eighteenth centuries; there are indications that they involved smallpox, cholera, parotiditis, typhus, and measles. Mansilla and Pijoan (1995) described findings in the remains of a 2-year-old child who lived in the seventeenth or eighteenth century in what is now México City, which strongly suggested a case of congenital syphilis. They also reviewed other evidences for treponemal infection in remains from other places in México. Márquez-Morfín (1998) mentioned, for the first half of the nineteenth century in México City, epidemics of influenza (1804), smallpox (1825) and cholera (1833). She described in detail the mortality which occurred in 1813 from a typhus epidemic.

‘Survival guides’, prepared for British colonists planning to travel to the Carib region, were listed by Halberstein (1997). They included the treatises of G. Trapham, written in 1679 in relation to Jamaica, of W. Hillary in 1766 concerning Barbados, and of R. Moseley in 1787, for the West Indies in general. The history of goiter, on the other hand, was considered by Greenwald (1957, 1969) for several South American countries.