The Venerealization of Peru: Race and Medical Knowledge in the Andean Periphery

This paper examines the formation of medical knowledge on venereal disease in Peru in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The study of VD in Peru was characterised by two research focuses: a clinical focus, which concentrated on questions of diagnosis and treatment, and a social focus, which concentrated on the question of prostitution’s role in the spread of VD. In Peru as elsewhere, biomedical attention on VD overlapped with a broader, non-medical, preoccupation with gonorrhoea and particularly with syphilis. Like few other diseases, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries commentators connected VD to anxieties over aberrant sexual behaviour and social and racial degeneration in a broader context of perceived uncontrolled, and possibly uncontrollable, social and political change. At the same time, and partly as a consequence of the introduction of more effective diagnosis and treatment, VD emerged as field in which policy makers, in alliance with physicians, could play a key role in moral and social governance. However, as Davidson and Hall note in their survey of the historiography of VD in Europe, “responses to VD have always been powerfully inflected by local and historical contingencies”. In Russia, Laura Engelstein has suggested, physicians viewed syphilis as expressive of the broader dangers that the increasing “westernization” of their society entailed. In South Africa, Karen Jochelson argues, medical discourse on VD was used to confirm theories about racial difference. In Peru, I argue in this paper, the making of medical knowledge on venereal disease was intimately tied to doctors’ racialized understandings of the character of the Peruvian population, and particularly of its non-white population.