Life-Giving Places in the Andes: How Narratives of Geography, Environment, and Disease Spawned Nineteenth-Century Health Resorts in South America

By the late nineteenth century, parts of the Peruvian Andes such as Jauja ranked as some of the world's top health resorts where patients suffering from tuberculosis could go for climate therapy to be healed.  Similar formal and informal health resorts also emerged in Córdoba, Argentina, and San José de Maipo, Chile.  Historians, however, have barely analyzed these important resorts even though they earned international prestige at the time and, today, illuminate broader narratives of geography, environment, and disease in Latin America.  Interestingly, the historical construction of these salubrious destinations did not emerge solely from physicians' medical studies.  Rather, the development of these high-elevation mountain resorts came through centuries of discursive depictions of the Andes by physicians, scientists, policy makers, developers, intellectuals, and patients who not only saw some Andean towns as healthy but also sought to escape from supposedly unhealthy, disease-infested coastal cities, especially Lima.  It was thus a combination of perceptions of Lima's bad air in the eighteenth century, the quest for national integration and economic development in the nineteenth century, and international medical studies in the early twentieth century, among many other factors, that drove tens of thousands of patients with pulmonary diseases to seek relief in specific Andean places.  This paper's analysis of these multiple, intertwined, and evolving stories about the life-giving Andes and their curative climates thus uncovers an important history -- not only of tuberculosis but also of landscape perceptions, geographical sciences, medical geography, nation building, economic development agendas, travel and tourism, and transportation initiatives.