Medical Research, Race, and Indigenous Health in the Yale Peruvian Scientific Expedition to Peru

This paper examines the work of doctors and scientists who accompanied the Yale Peruvian Scientific Expedition in the discovery of Machu Picchu and the exploration of the Andean highlands in 1911 and 1912. While the expedition is most commonly associated with the exhaustive excavation of Peru’s famous archeological site, its work and objectives were far more diverse. The expedition sought to provide a topographical survey of the Andean highlands and collect a vast array of anthropological and archeological information on contemporary Andean society and the indigenous Andean past. In order to fulfill this mission, it comprised a wide range of scientists that included geologists, topographers, archeologists, physical anthropologists, ethnologists, and physicians. In my paper, I examine the work of Dr. Luther T. Nelson, a surgeon who accompanied the expedition to study the most common illnesses in highland communities as well as the effects of coca chewing on the physical health of indigenous populations. Among other things, Nelson brought back to the United States wide-ranging data on smallpox, various kinds of fevers, respiratory diseases, and venereal diseases common among indigenous groups he studied in the villages of Arma and Vilcabamba. He also compiled hundreds of medical photographs of indigenous people as well as extensive anthropological measurements of their height, physical shape, thoracic and pulmonary capacity, and eyesight for further scientific analysis in the United States. Through a close reading of Nelson’s research materials and those of others such as the osteologist George Eaton, my work seeks to problematize how the indigenous Andean body and indigenous health became objects of analysis in anthropology, transnational race science, and discourses of public health and improvement during the 1910s. In doing so, it also seeks to interrogate the shifting relationship between anthropology, medicine, and public health during this period in Peru and the United States.